Note 184 — Chapter XXI · FREETHOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

5. One of the best-beloved names in English literature, Charles Lamb, is on several counts to be numbered with those of the freethinkers of his day—who included Godwin and Hazlitt—though he had no part in any direct propaganda. Himself at most a Unitarian, but not at all given to argument on points of faith, he did his work for reason partly by way of the subtle and winning humanism of such an essay as New Year’s Eve, which seems to have been what brought upon him the pedantically pious censure of Southey, apparently for its lack of allusion to a future state; partly by his delicately-entitled letter, The Tombs in the Abbey, in which he replied to Southey’s stricture. “A book which wants only a sounder religious feeling to be as delightful as it is original” had been Southey’s pompous criticism, in a paper on Infidelity.184 In his reply, Lamb commented on Southey’s life-long habit of scoffing at the Church of Rome, and gravely repudiated the test of orthodoxy for human character.