had little to offer him beyond the dignity of his profession, and it is difficult to live on dignity alone. The respectable and agreeable families in the place, to whom he had flattered himself he would be useful, were not very prompt to support that dignity, and eventually it had to sustain itself on the wages of an agricultural labourer. Indeed, he says, had it not been for the good offices of Dr Benson and Dr Kippis, eminent eighteenth century divines, who procured him “now and then an extraordinary five pounds from different charities,” he believed he should have starved.[5] “At Needham” he says, “I felt the effect of a low, despised situation, together with that arising from the want of popular talents. There were several vacancies in congregations in that neighbourhood where my sentiments would have been no objection to me, but I was never thought of. Even my next neighbour, whose sentiments were as free as my own, and known to be so, declined making exchanges with me, which, when I left that part of the country, he acknowledged was not owing to any dislike his people had to me as heretical, but for other reasons, the more genteel part of his hearers always absenting themselves when they heard I was to preach for him. But visiting that country some years afterwards, when I had raised myself to some degree of notice in the world, and being invited to preach in that very pulpit, the same people crowded to hear me, though my elocution was not much improved, and they professed to admire one of the same discourses they had formerly despised.” The iron would have entered the soul of a weaker man, but Priestley, true to himself, never lost hope or faltered in his courage. However short his commons, Providence had endowed him with the continual feast of a contented mind. He firmly believed, even during the darkest hours of that Suffolk time, that this same wise Providence was disposing everything for the best. Notwithstanding his unfavourable circumstances, “I was,” he says, “far from being unhappy at Needham.” He boarded with a family for whose kindness he was always grateful. He had free access to one or two private libraries in the district, in particular one belonging to Mr Alexander, a Quaker. “Here it was,” he says, “that I was first acquainted with any person of that persuasion; and I must acknowledge my obligation to many of them in every future stage of my life. I have met with the noblest instances of liberality of sentiment and the truest generosity among them.”