No adequate estimate or the merits of Carlile, and no tolerant judgment of his faults can be formed without taking into account the aspects of the times when he struggled, and the unscrupulous and powerful enemies against which he contended. _Then_ the most hateful types of Toryism and Christianity were rampant—_Then_ Castlereagh declared in Parliament that it was necessary that ‘the last spark of the spirit of the French Revolution should be extinguished.’(1) Malignant and servile Attorney-Generals and vindictive Judges left no man’s liberty or life safe if he professed liberal opinions. The press was intimidated, and public meetings, who complained, butchered. It was under these formidable circumstances that Carlile undertook to free the press, and to make the famous works of the ‘rebellious needleman’ household books in England, and to oppose himself singly to crown and mitre, ana brave whatever political and priestly vengeance could inflict, when political and priestly power were unchecked by public opinion. 1. The apparent offensiveness of some of his addresses was created by Christians themselves, an Instance occurs in his letter to ‘Old William Wilberforce,’ to whom he said ‘sinner,’ instead of ‘sir,’ but this was because Wilberforce was a self-styled sinner.—Repub. vol. ii. p. 388 It is in reference to the same public circumstances that Carlile’s faults are to be judged. Those who in these days shall peruse the pages of Carlile’s periodicals will be startled at the fierce invective and measureless denunciation which abound there. But let those who affect to pass over his name on this account, call to recollection the deadly arena of antagonism in which he had to fight the battle of freedom. The course he took is indeed not to be imitated now. We exist in better times, when the conflict of reason has succeeded to the strife of passion. We have better arts, because we have a fairer field, and we owe that fairer field to such men as Carlile. Let us not impose our modes of warfare on men who fought with savages, and demand of the actors of other times that virtue which belongs exclusively to our opportunities. Men who are patriotic in easy chairs and by the fire-side only, who never incur damped feet in the public cause, and essay the reform of society in kid gloves and white waistcoats, know nothing, and can allow nothing for that strife of spirit in which men live, who take up the dice box of oppression to play for liberty, and whose stakes are their lives. Let the Christian whose altar is protected by law, whose arrogance over infidels is part and parcel of the statutes, and is applauded by public opinion; let the sleek and unruffled saint beware how he judges one on whose head was every day poured out the phials of holy malignity, whom the highest authorities stooped to defame, whose name was sacked at the instigation of every miserable deacon or venal informer, whose household