“——I now as frankly say, I like your letter of the 24th inst. as that I disliked your letter of Feb. 23rd.
“My first feeling was that I must have been wrong in censuring its elder brother. But I went back to it, and there was still entire all that had offended me at first. You rejoiced in making an Atheist. I saw no end to this. The man who is bitten with the zeal of proselytism hopes to make a convert at least three times a week. You say now, how could you help doing as you did? You were in solitude: had but one friend. To this I answer—it stands in your February letter—‘I need not add that Austen is of my faith. Bedingfield also, my old friend Bedingfield, is become an Atheist.’
“I look also to the passage about Wooler. There it stands,—pure, unmitigated, groundless contempt for the Whigs. As you express yourself now, you come so near to my sentiments that it is not worth disputing with you, and I have done.
“You seem not to know what I mean by religion. You ask whether I do not mean benevolence. No: I should be ashamed of such a juggle of words. The religious man, I apprehend, is, as Tom Warton phrases it in the title of one of his poems, ‘An enthusiastic or a lover of nature.’ I am an adorer of nature: I should pine to death if I did not live in the midst of so majestic a structure as I behold on every side. I am never weary of admiring and reverencing it. All that I see, the earth, the sea, the rivers, the trees, the clouds, animals, and, most of all, man, fills me with love and astonishment. My soul is full to bursting with the mystery of all this, and I love it the better for its mysteriousness. It is too wonderful for me; it is past finding out: but it is beyond expression delicious. This is what I call religion, and if it is the religion you loath you are not the man I took you for.
| LADY CAROLINE LAMB. | 265 |
“You express yourself ready to burst with joy on the event of the Spanish Revolution. All that I have seen I like, and I am willing to anticipate all that is good from it. A revolution that gives representation, that gives freedom of the press, that sets open the door of the prison, and that abolishes the inquisition; and all this without bloodshed, must have the approbation of every liberal mind. But I know too little respecting it. If it gives, as you say, universal suffrage, that is pain to my heart. Without the spirit of prophecy, I can anticipate the most disastrous effects from that. England is not yet ripe for universal suffrage, and, as I have often said, if it were established here, the monarchy probably would not stand a year. Now the medicine that is too strong for the English nation, I can never believe will work well in Spain.
“I understand the picture you make of yourself. You begin to find yourself at home, and you can do comparatively very well without me. It is well. An old man is perpetually losing friends by death or otherwise, and he would be glad to keep some. But I also must do as well as I can. As Shakespeare says, ‘Crabbed age and youth cannot live together.’ It is of more importance that you should go on well, than that you should stand in need of me.”
