Unbelievers have not always been honest enough thus to express their real feelings; but this we know concerning them, that when they have renounced their birthright of hope, they have not been able to divest themselves of fear. From the nature of the human mind this might be presumed, and in fact it is so. They may deaden the heart and stupify the conscience, but they cannot destroy the imaginative faculty. There is a remarkable proof of this in Elia's Essays, a book which wants only a sounder religious feeling, to be as delightful as it is original. In that upon "Witches and other Night Fears," he says: "It is not book, or picture, or the stories of foolish servants, which create these terrors in children. They can at most but give them a direction. Dear little T. H., who of all children has been brought up with the most scrupulous exclusion of every taint of superstition, who was never allowed to hear of goblin or apparition, or scarcely to be told of bad men, or to hear or read of any distressing story, finds all this world of fear, from which he, has been so rigidly excluded ab extra, in his own 'thick-coming fancies; and from his little midnight pillow this nurse-child of optimism will start at shapes, unborrowed of tradition, in sweats to which the reveries of the cell-damned murderer are tranquillity." This poor child, instead of being trained up in the way which he should go, had been bred in the ways of modern philosophy; he had systematically been prevented from knowing any thing of that Saviour who said, "Suffer little children to come unto me, and forbid them not; for of such is the kingdom of heaven;" care had been taken that he should not pray to God, nor lie down at night in reliance upon His good Providence.
[Page 267,] line 14 from foot. "Given king" in bliss and a "given chamberlain" in torment. A reference to Southey's "Vision of Judgment," 1820, wherein George III. is received into heaven, among those coming from hell to arraign him being Wilkes, thus described:—
Beholding the foremost,
Him by the cast of his eye oblique, I knew as the firebrand
Whom the unthinking populace held for their idol and hero,
Lord of Misrule in his day.
[Page 268,] line 5. A jest of the Devil. Southey's early "Ballads and Metrical Tales" are rich in legends of the Devil, somewhat in the vein of Ingoldsby, though lacking Barham's rollicking fun.
[Page 268,] line 10. A noble Lord. Lord Byron, whose "Vision of Judgment," written in 1821 in ridicule of Southey's, begins:—
Saint Peter sat by the celestial gate:
His keys were rusty, and the lock was dull.
[Page 268,] line 19. A life of George Fox. Southey was collecting for some years materials for a life of George Fox, the first Quaker, but he did not carry out the project.
[Page 268,] line 22. The Methodists are shy. Southey's Life of Wesley was published in 1820. It was greatly admired by Coleridge.
[Page 268,] line 24. The errors of that Church. See Southey's "Ballads and Metrical Tales" again, for comic versions of legends of saints.
[Page 269,] line 26. And N. Randal Norris, Sub-Treasurer of the Inner Temple, who died in 1827.