In the Journal (continued), Pamela describes one evening when Mr. B. reads aloud from her journal to everyone at the dinner table. The selection he reads is a parody of a psalm:
WHEN sad I sat in B——n-hall,
All watched round about;
And thought of every absent Friend,
The Tears for Grief burst out.
The same verse in the original psalm, which Mr. B. has Mr. Williams read aloud for comparison, is as follows:
WHEN we did sit in Babylon,
The Rivers round about:
Then in Remembrance of Sion,
The Tears for Grief burst out.
This psalm, Psalm 137, describes the Babylonian captivity, during which Jews who have been exiled from Zion remember and grieve for the loss of their holy city. Pamela's parody is not intended to critique or satirize the psalm. Rather, by parodying the psalm, Pamela captures the depths of her feelings. Instead of a group of faithful exiles held captive in Babylon, Pamela describes her own lonely experience of captivity in "B--n hall." (Based on one edition where Richardson spells out the full name of the hall, it is "Brandon hall," suggesting that Mr. B.'s last name is Brandon.) Instead of rivers "round about," Pamela is surrounded by Mr. B.'s spies, so that she is constantly being "watched round about." Pamela's thoughts of "every absent Friend" are as powerful to her as "Remembrance of Sion" (or Zion) is to the exiles in the psalm. Pamela's parody suggests that her grief is as deep as the storied grief of religious exiles—only she must bear her grief alone, whereas the captives in Babylon at least have one another.
Mr. B. reads Pamela's parody of the psalm and then moves onto other writing she produced while at his Lincolnshire estate. It seems odd at first that he would want the world to know how desperate Pamela felt when she wrote this particular parody, but her later writing grows far more cheery. Mr. B. reads the parody to demonstrate how much Pamela's feelings have changed.
