After Kettlewell's death, no one was so intimate with Robert Nelson as Dr. George Hickes. They lived near together[41] in Ormond Street, and for the last eleven years of Nelson's life met almost daily. In forming any estimate of Hickes's character, the warm-hearted esteem with which Nelson regarded him[42] should not be lost sight of. Whatever were his faults, he must have possessed many high qualities to have thus completely won the heart of so good a man. The feeling was fully reciprocated; and those who knew with what intensity of blind zeal Hickes attached himself to the interests of his party, must have been surprised that this intimacy was not interrupted even by his sore disappointment at Nelson's defection from the nonjuring communion. In Hickes there was nothing of the calm and tempered judgment which ruled in Nelson's mind. From the day that he vacated his deanery, and fixed up his indignant protest in Worcester Cathedral,[43] he threw his heart and soul into the nonjuring cause. Unity might be a blessing, and schism a disaster; but it is doubtful whether he would have made the smallest concession in order to attain the one, or avoid the other. Even Bishop Ken said of him that he showed zeal to make the schism incurable.[44] A good man, and a scholar of rare erudition, he possessed nevertheless the true temper of a bigot. In middle life he had been brought into close acquaintance with the fanatic extravagances of Scotch Covenanters, his aversion to which might seem to have taught him, not the excellence of a more temperate spirit, but the desirability of rushing toward similar extremes in an opposite direction. He delighted in controversy in proportion to its heat, and too often his pen was dipped in gall, when he directed the acuteness and learning which none denied to him against any who swerved, this way or that, from the narrow path of dogma and discipline which had been marked with his own approval. Tillotson was 'an atheist,'[45] freethinkers were 'the first-born sons of Satan,' the Established Church was 'fallen into mortal schism,'[46] Ken, for thinking of reunion, was 'a half-hearted wheedler,'[47] Roman Catholics were 'as gross idolaters as Egyptian worshippers of leeks,'[48] Nonconformists were 'fanatics,' Quakers were 'blasphemers.'[49] From the peaceful researches, on which he built a lasting name, in Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian antiquities, he returned each time with renewed zest to polemical disputes, and found relaxation in the strife of words. It was no promising omen for the future of the nonjuring party, that the Court of St. Germains should have appointed him and Wagstaffe first bishops of that Communion. The consecration was kept for several years a close secret, and Robert Nelson himself may probably have been ignorant[50] of the high dignity to which 'my neighbour the Dean' had attained.