The fourth volume of the _Republican_ Carlile also dedicated to Gifford, the Attorney General, beginning, ‘My constant and learned friend, between you and the Vice Society I am at loss how to pay my courtesies, so as to avoid jealousy. You acted nobly with my first volume. My second you neglected; and I had resolved to stop when I heard of your renewed prosecutions. I am sorry we did not understand each other better before.’ A paragraph in the Dedication of his sixth volume to George IV. was in these words, ‘You are not only the head of the State but of the Church too, and as I am an intermeddler with the matters of both, I, your Banishment Act notwithstanding, dedicate my volume to both heads at once, with the most profound hope and prayer that neither of them may ache after reading it.’ When Carlile took notice of Mease, he thus addressed him—‘To Mr. Thomas Mease, grocer, draper, and methodist.’ The letter to Mease, was dated ‘Dorchester Gaol, December 18, year 1822; of the God that was born of a woman, who was his own father, and who was killed to please himself. The _immortal_ god that died.’ The letter commenced thus,—‘Sir Saint and Savage.’ To Mr. Dronsfield he wrote—‘I am not humble; civility to all; servility to none is the becoming characteristic of manhood.’(1) Alluding to the extensive sale of Wat Tyler, which had such an influence on his early fortunes, Carlile exclaimed, ‘Glory to thee, O Southey! Happy mayst thou be in singing hexameters to thy old Royal Master, when thou hast passed the _reality_ as well as the _vision_ of judgment! Yes, my patron! to that best of thy productions, “Wat Tyler,” do I owe the encouragement I first found to persevere.(2) Of his own Every Woman’s Book, Carlile said, ‘It had sustained Mr. Cobbett’s malignity—one of the most powerful venoms which the animal world had produced.’(3) Carlile characterised the weak point in his own character with severe felicity, when speaking of others. ‘Conceit,’ said he, ‘is a malady of humanity, of which some people die.’(4) These words might stand as the epitaph of his own public influence. The following passage occurred in that letter to me, alluded to in the preface. ‘You, Southwell and others,’ said he, ‘are now where I once was, resting upon the mere flippant vulgarisms of what you and the world consent to call Atheistic infidelity, regulating your amount of wisdom by a critical contrast with other people’s folly.(5) I hope we were never amenable to the censure with which this sentence opens: the concluding words are shrewd and instructive, which I repeat for the sake of those young gentlemen who take up infidelity as a pastime, instead as a principle. 1. Repub. vol. vii. p. 868. 2. Repub. vol. vii. p. 674. 3. Lion, vol. ii. p. 450. 4. Oracle of Reason, vol. i. p. 366. 5. Oracle of Reason, vol. i. p. 366.