When the before noticed dissension occurred, Charles Lamb and Charles
Lloyd, between whom a strong friendship had latterly sprung up, became
alienated from Mr. Coleridge, and cherished something of an indignant
feeling. Strange as it may appear, C. Lamb determined to desert the
inglorious ground of neutrality, and to commence active operations
against his late friend; but the arrows were taken from his own peculiar
armoury; tipped, not with iron, but wit. He sent Mr. Coleridge the
following letter. Mr. Coleridge gave me this letter, saying, "These young
visionaries will do each other no good." The following is Charles Lamb's
letter to Mr. C.
"THESES QUAEDAM THEOLOGICAE.
1st. Whether God loves a lying angel better than a true man?
2nd. Whether the archangel Uriel could affirm an untruth, and if he
could, whether he would?
3rd. Whether honesty be an angelic virtue, or not rather to be
reckoned among those qualities which the school-men term 'Virtutes
minus splendidae'?
4th. Whether the higher order of Seraphim illuminati ever sneer?
5th. Whether pure intelligences can love?
6th. Whether the Seraphim ardentes do not manifest their virtues, by
the way of vision and theory; and whether practice be not a
sub-celestial and merely human virtue?
7th. Whether the vision beatific be anything more or less than a
perpetual representment, to each individual angel, of his own present
attainments, and future capabilities, somehow in the manner of mortal
looking-glasses, reflecting a perpetual complacency and self
satisfaction?
8th. and last. Whether an immortal and amenable soul may not come to
be condemned at last, and the man never suspect it beforehand?
Learned Sir, my friend,
Presuming on our long habits of friendship, and emboldened further by
your late liberal permission to avail myself of your correspondence, in
case I want any knowledge, (which I intend to do, when I have no
Encyclopedia, or Ladies Magazine at hand to refer to, in any matter of
science,) I now submit to your enquiries the above theological
propositions, to be by you defended or oppugned, or both, in the schools
of Germany, whither, I am told, you are departing, to the utter
dissatisfaction of your native Devonshire, and regret of universal
England; but to my own individual consolation, if, through the channel of
your wished return, learned sir, my friend, may be transmitted to this
our island, from those famous theological wits of Leipsic and Gottingen,
any rays of illumination, in vain to be derived from the home growth of
our English halls and colleges. Finally wishing, learned sir, that you
may see Schiller, and swing in a wood, (vide poems) and sit upon a tun,
and eat fat hams of Westphalia,