I did not express myself clearly about what I think a false topic insisted on so frequently in consolatory addresses on the death of Infants.  I know something like it is in Scripture, but I think humanly spoken.  It is a natural thought, a sweet fallacy to the Survivors—­but still a fallacy.  If it stands on the doctrine of this being a probationary state, it is liable to this dilemma.  Omniscience, to whom possibility must be clear as act, must know of the child, what it would hereafter turn out:  if good, then the topic is false to say it is secured from falling into future wilfulness, vice, &c.  If bad, I do not see how its exemption from certain future overt acts by being snatched away at all tells in its favor.  You stop the arm of a murderer, or arrest the finger of a pickpurse, but is not the guilt incurred as much by the intent as if never so much acted?  Why children are hurried off, and old reprobates of a hundred left, whose trial humanly we may think was complete at fifty, is among the obscurities of providence.  The very notion of a state of probation has darkness in it.  The all-knower has no need of satisfying his eyes by seeing what we will do, when he knows before what we will do.  Methinks we might be condemn’d before commission.  In these things we grope and flounder, and if we can pick up a little human comfort that the child taken is snatch’d from vice (no great compliment to it, by the bye), let us take it.  And as to where an untried child goes, whether to join the assembly of its elders who have borne the heat of the day—­fire-purified martyrs, and torment-sifted confessors—­what know we?  We promise heaven methinks too cheaply, and assign large revenues to minors, incompetent to manage them.  Epitaphs run upon this topic of consolation, till the very frequency induces a cheapness.  Tickets for admission into Paradise are sculptured out at a penny a letter, twopence a syllable, &c.  It is all a mystery; and the more I try to express my meaning (having none that is clear) the more I flounder.  Finally, write what your own conscience, which to you is the unerring judge, seems best, and be careless about the whimsies of such a half-baked notionist as I am.  We are here in a most pleasant country, full of walks, and idle to our hearts desire.  Taylor has dropt the London.  It was indeed a dead weight.  It has got in the Slough of Despond.  I shuffle off my part of the pack, and stand like Xtian with light and merry shoulders.  It had got silly, indecorous, pert, and every thing that is bad.  Both our kind remembrances to Mrs. K. and yourself, and stranger’s-greeting to Lucy—­is it Lucy or Ruth?—­that gathers wise sayings in a Book.  C. LAMB.

[The London Magazine passed into the hands of Henry Southern in September, 1825.  Lamb’s last article for it was in the August number—­“Imperfect Dramatic Illusion,” reprinted in the Last Essays of Elia as “Stage Illusion.”]