and ministers of the Church of England, and ministers and members of many communions of Christians, Bradbury mixed with freedom with the moving parties in the City, and was ever ready to lift up his voice loudly about all the political circumstances of the passing hours. Thus the two men, although ministers of the same order, within a very short distance of each other, were in their sympathies wide apart; they desired, indeed, the same great ends, but the roads they took to their attainment were widely different. It is still singular and unaccountable, but for the personal motives we have assigned above, that Bradbury should have expressed himself with so much bitterness and hostility concerning his old friend, whose principles, neither in religion nor politics, could ever have been at any very great remove from his own; but so it is, that amidst the multitude of friends that honoured and esteemed Watts highly for his work’s sake, we find Bradbury standing aside like a very Shimei pouring upon him his perpetually reiterated torrent of contempt, obloquy, and scorn, and no motive appears but the dangerous one which influences three-fourths of all the evil and hatred in the world; jealousy of a rank for which he was unfit, and genius to which he could not attain. On the whole, it may be said of Bradbury, in the language of an old English poet, he was “like a pair of snuffers, he snips the filth in other men, and retains it in himself;” it could not be said of him “the snuffers were of pure gold.” As Archbishop Abbott says of Jonah, in his sermons on the prophet: “Some drams and grains of gold appear in him and his action, but dross is there by pounds; little wine, but store of water; some wheat, but chaff enough.” [Illustration] [Illustration] CHAPTER XI. His Times.