Of Carlile’s family, I can gather little beyond this, that his father had some reputation as an arithmetician. He published a collection of arithmetical, mathematical, and algebraical questions. His talent was individual though mediocre. He put his questions into verse and intermixed them with paradox. His career was various and brief: first a shoemaker, he aspired to be and became an exciseman. Like Burns, his habits suffered by his profession, and he often fell into intoxication. Of his own accord he retired from the Excise, became successively schoolmaster and soldier, and died at the age of 34, no person’s enemy but his own.(1) Carlile’s mother was now left a widow, with three infant children. For several years she was in a flourishing business, but it began to decay with the pressure of the times, about 1800, and she was afflicted alternately with sickness and poverty. Thence to the time of her death, she was assisted by Carlile, who was her only son. As a woman she was virtuous, as a mother kind and indulgent. She died at the age of 60. It is an evidence of Carlile’s honourable notions of duty, that out of thirty shillings per week, which he earned as a journeyman, he supported his wife and several children, and spared an offering for the support of his mother and sisters; and it deserves to be mentioned in his behalf, that the first dissatisfaction he experienced in married life arose from the opposition which he received in the discharge of these generous duties. 1. Carlile to Lord Brougham, Gauntlet, No. 8, p. 113. 1833. Richard Carlile was born in Ashburton, Devonshire, December 8, 1790. He was but four years of age at the death of his father. He early felt his father’s ambition. Before he was twelve years of age, he determined to be something in the world, and afterwards his unexpressed ideas were ever at work and accumulating. His dreams by night, and his thoughts by day, all worked one way, and vaguely contemplated some sort of purification of the church.(1) But how far he was from understanding the part he was to play is clear from the circumstance, that on the 5th of November, he used to gather faggots to burn ‘Old Tom Paine,’ instead of Guy Fawkes; and it was not till 1810, when he was twenty years old, that he first saw in the hands of an old man in Exeter, a copy of the Rights of Man.(2)