Tuesday, February 10, 2009

Instinctive compassion ...

... Happy birthday to Charles Lamb: `The True Poetical Enthusiasm'. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

“One of the bitterest pangs of remorse I ever felt was when a child – when my kind old aunt had strained her pocket-strings to bestow a sixpenny whole plum-cake upon me. In my way home through the Borough, I met a venerable old man, not mendicant, but thereabouts – a look-beggar, not a verbal petitionist [Mayhew and Dickens would have savored this]; and in the coxcombry of taught-charity I gave away the cake to him. I walked on a little in all the pride of an Evangelical peacock, when of a sudden my old aunt’s kindness crossed me – the sum it was to her – the pleasure she had a right to expect that I – not the old impostor – should take in eating her cake – the cursed ingratitude by which, under the colour of Christian virtue, I had frustrated her cherished purpose. I sobbed, I wept, and took it to heart so grievously, that I think I never suffered the like – and I was right. It was a piece of unfeeling hypocrisy, and proved a lesson to me ever after. The cake has long been masticated, consigned to the dunghill with the ashes of that unseasonable pauper.”

Lamb's sense of religious obligation may have been rudimentary, but this suggests that his sense of religion itself may have been quite profound.

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