gods were strewn in the streets by policemen selected for their ferocity—whose wife was consigned to a gaol, and himself doomed to spend nine years and a half in the endurance of the unceasing indignity of vindictive imprisonment. Where the Christian in ermine has been brutal, vituperative, and malignant, let him not exact a perennial delicacy of sentiment from his victim, writhing under his provocations. Taking these circumstances into account he is little acquainted with human nature, who will wonder that Carlile, in the sixth year of an imprisonment caused by Lords Castlereagh, Liverpool, Sidmouth, and Eldon, should from Dorchester Gaol, dedicate the volume of the Trials of his Wife, Sister, and Shopmen in these words—‘To the Memory of Robert Stewart, Marquis of Londonderry, Viscount Castlereagh, etc., who eventually did that for himself which millions wished some noble mind would do for him—_Cut his throat_.’ The strait-laced moralist of this generation may turn to the volumes of the Carlile’s Trials, and find that Mrs. Carlile was indicted for publishing a paragraph justifying assassination of tyrants. I have no sympathy with this doctrine. I deem it far nobler and more useful to society, to submit to be the victim than to victimize others. But Carlile acted on a resolute sense of self-defence. He was a believer in Brutus and Colonel Titus, and he lived in darker times when the policy of moral resistance was less clear and less practicable than now. The Society for the Suppression of Vice distinguished him in 1820, as ‘that most audacious offender, Carlile.’(1) The _Age_ called him ‘a miscreant tinker.’(2) The _Sunday Times_ described him as ‘a wretched man in the very kennel of contempt, from whom his proselytes fled as if he were emerged from a pest-house, and advised that he should rot in oblivion.’? And in this way papers and pulpits rang fascinating changes on such adjectives as fiend, monster, wretch, execrable, hideous, obscene, abandoned, infamous, etc., etc., till when he took a tour through the country in 1828, the idea of Carlile current among the pious was that of a black griffin with red glaring eyes—a tail with forked end, talons instead of fingers, and hoofs instead of toes.’(3) 1. Repub. vol. ii. p. 182. 2. Repub. vol. xii. p. 121 3. Repub. vol. xii. p. 151.