grant it. The
puritans, I have read in Southey's Book, knew the distinction. They made
people observe Sunday rigorously, would not let a nursery maid walk out
in the fields with children for recreation on that day. But _then_--they
gave the people a holliday from all sorts of work every second Tuesday.
This was giving to the Two Caesars that which was _his_ respective.
Wise, beautiful, thoughtful, generous Legislators! Would Wilberforce
give us our Tuesdays? No, d--n him. He would turn the six days into
sevenths,

And those 3 smiling seasons of the year
Into a Russian winter.
_Old Play_.

I am sitting opposite a person who is making strange distortions with
the gout, which is not unpleasant--to me at least. What is the reason we
do not sympathise with pain, short of some terrible Surgical operation?
Hazlitt, who boldly says all he feels, avows that not only he does not
pity sick people, but he hates them. I obscurely recognise his meaning.
Pain is probably too selfish a consideration, too simply a consideration
of self-attention. We pity poverty, loss of friends etc. more complex
things, in which the Sufferers feelings are associated with others. This
is a rough thought suggested by the presence of gout; I want head to
extricate it and plane it. What is all this to your Letter? I felt it to
be a good one, but my turn, when I write at all, is perversely to travel
out of the record, so that my letters are any thing but answers. So you
still want a motto? You must not take my ironical one, because your
book, I take it, is too serious for it. Bickerstaff might have used it
for _his_ lucubrations. What do you think of (for a Title)

RELIGIO TREMULI OR TREMEBUNDI

There is Religio-Medici and Laici.--But perhaps the volume is not quite
Quakerish enough or exclusively for it--but your own VIGILS is perhaps
the Best. While I have space, let me congratulate with you the return of
Spring--what a Summery Spring too! all those qualms about the dog and
cray-fish melt before it. I am going to be happy and _vain_ again.

A hasty farewell C. LAMB.

["Southey's Book"--_The Book of the Church_.

"Would Wilberforce give us our Tuesdays?"--William Wilberforce, the
abolitionist and the principal "Puritan" of that day.]

LETTER 344

CHARLES LAMB TO MRS. THOMAS ALLSOP

[P.M. April 13, 1824.]

Dear Mrs. A.--Mary begs me to say how much she regrets w