It is due to Carlile to observe that the annoyance he marshalled against authority was chiefly retaliative. He disowned a placard put in his window, which said, ‘This is the Mart for Sedition and Blasphemy,’ as he deemed it an admission that he did vend something of the kind. ‘I sell,’ said he, ‘only truth and right reason.’(1) (In parenthesis it maybe observed, that he denied that any human tribunal was competent to declare what was blasphemy.) How much farther Carlile was impartial than are Christians, is evidenced by the fact that he published Bishop Watson’s Apology for the Bible, in conjunction with Paine’s Age of Reason.(2) In another respect he behaved as Christians never behave, he never questioned the youths he employed, nor any of his dependents as to their opinions, nor did he use any means to induce them to comprehend or adopt his.(3) He held his opinions too proudly to intrigue or supplicate others to accept them. In candour, in independency of judgment, in perfect moral fearlessness of character, I believe Carlile cannot be paralleled among the public men of his time. Lovel writes: He is a slave who dare not be, In the right with two or three. Carlile was no slave. He was able to stand in the right by himself against the world. One forgives his errors, his vanity, and his egotism, for the bravery of his bearing and his speech. Though Paine was his great prototype, he was prompt, both in his early enthusiasm and in his latter days, to acknowledge Paine’s defects as a theologian. ‘About “God” Paine,’ said he, ‘was not altogether wise, but less unwise than the world at large.(4) In his earliest attachments, Carlile discriminated, ‘I neither look,’ wrote he ‘on Mr. Gibbon nor Mr. Hume, as standards of infidelity to the Christian religion.‘(5) He hesitated at Shelley’s views of marriage, deeming them crude.(6) Carlile was able to take anything up or put anything down at the bidding of his judgment. He said to Mr. Searlett, ‘At present I am not a tinman, but I should never feel ashamed to return to it to earn an honest livelihood, if circumstances should render it necessary in this or any other country,’(7) 1. Repub. vol. v.r. 12. 2. Repub. vol. v. p. 89 3. Repub. vi. p. 778. 4. Scourge, p. 110. 5. Repub. vol. ii. p. 168. 6. Repub. vol. v. p. 148. 7. Repub. vol. ii. p. 403.