I had known him as a customer through that time. He pleaded that his father had been an old politician: nor was my suspicion excited by his having a brother in the Hatton Garden Police. When I entered upon No. 55, he pleaded what a great convenience it would be to him in business, if I would allow him to lodge in my house, as he had a shop next door without a dwelling-house. I had almost yielded; but the shrewd suspicions of Mrs. Carlile, re-acting upon his villainous countenance, put it aside. He was then placed in an upper story lodging of the opposite house, (where was born my statue of Paine) in the under part of which was placed a man of the name of John Carlisle, a bookseller, to oppose me, in conflict with another class of publications. This was the work of the government, superintended by their agent, John Reeve. Edwards did not scruple to talk to me about meeting the Archbishop of Canterbury in Windsor Castle; but left me to infer, that it was about his art as a modeller, not as a spy. I can now see, that he was placed in Hone’s old shop, to keep out a political publisher; and I have since divined a deep history of the spy system of that time, which I never feared, because I had nothing morally to fear in what I purposed to do. One, I have marked, as an old acquaintance, a man connected with the Stamp Office, very regularly at my lectures for years. From, or in the house of John Carlisle, by Edwards, was concocted the plot called the Cato Street Conspiracy. In beginning, middle, and end, that was wholly the work of Lords Castlereagh and Sidmouth, with Edwards as an agent. After the finish of that political tragedy, Edwards was provided for in one of the colonies, it has been said, the Cape of Good Hope. John Carlisle dwindled into great poverty in Fleet Street, was made permanent constable, and at last very strangely got his house burned down, just after I came triumphantly from six years’ imprisonment in Dorchester Gaol, and established myself _ruinously_ in splendid No. 62.’(1) Yet it was in such times and amid such dangers that Carlile formed the resolution, and adhered to it to the day of his death, never to cease any publication so long as any prosecution or intimidation menaced it.