“I esteem it a singular happiness to have lived in an age and country in which I have been at full liberty both to investigate, and by preaching and writing to propagate, religious truth; that though the freedom I have used for this purpose was for some time disadvantageous to me, it was not long so, and that my present situation is such that I can, with the greatest openness, urge whatever appears to me the truth of the Gospel, not only without giving the least offence, but with the entire approbation of those with whom I am particularly connected.” Dr Aikin, visiting him in 1784, says in a letter to Mrs Aikin:— “The great philosopher, with his simple, bland, unaffected manners, contented and happy, and declaring that he had not a wish on earth unsatisfied, gave me infinite delight.” These halcyon days were, however, but as the calm before the storm, and the contented and happy philosopher had soon need of all his philosophy, and of all his Christianity too, in face of the ungoverned fury of the mob which, to use Wedgwood’s words, swept like a hurricane over him and his friends. The 14th of July 1791—the anniversary of the French Revolution—was celebrated in several towns in England without interruption or any untoward circumstance; that day, however, was long remembered by the inhabitants of Birmingham with feelings akin to horror. It is certain that the popular rising which then took place in that town was in the outset mainly directed against Priestley. The course of events proves this. As it happened, the appetite in the mob for mischief grew by what it fed upon, and many others, his friends and political and religious associates, were involved in the disaster which overtook him. For it would appear that those who, in the first instance, instigated and directed the outrage lost all control over the forces which they invoked, and the rising, which in the beginning was intended to visit Priestley with the vengeance which the Cracow mob inflicted on his prototype Socinus, developed into a wild anarchical riot, confused and purposeless except as gratifying a wanton lust for rapine and destruction. Many contemporary accounts exist of the Birmingham riots of 1791, and although, as might be expected from the temper of the times, some of the narratives are not wholly uncoloured by prejudice and the partisan spirit of political and religious feeling, it is not difficult to put together a true view of an episode which profoundly affected all parties and sent a thrill of apprehension and alarm throughout the country. Political feeling at the period ran high. Europe had recently witnessed the spectacle of a revolution which had filled the governing classes of every state with awe and even terror, and the great masses of the people in this and other countries, to whom all political power was denied, were beginning to realise what might be possible to concerted action properly organised and vigorously pressed.