between Truth and Force, between Persecution and Benevolence, is fundamental, irreconcilable, and eternal.

Impregnated by these persuasions, prompted by these motives, and cheared by these prospects, I acknowledge no offence; I have committed none. I deprecate no punishment; I have deserved none. An absolution from all suffering and censure would excite in my breast not so much a selfish joy for a mere escape from danger, as a generous gratulation on the exhibition in you of that sensibility and benevolence, which exalts the human nature to a resemblance with the divine. Not that I am so estranged from the satisfactions of personal security, from the luxuries of literary leisure, and the comforts of domestic peace, as to view with indifference or complacency, much less to solicit, penalties and imprisonment: nor again, so uninfluenced by true dignity of character and the exhortations of unimpeachable integrity, as to enter into any commutation with a timid and temporising selfishness; as to surrender for mere animal existence all that renders life itself either valuable or supportable. I am equally provided for each alternative; for ease and freedom, with contentment and equanimity; for restraint and punishment, with fortitude and exultation. I

have lived too long, and have endured too many conflicts; my consciousness of desert is too well corroborated by the consenting regards of estimable men; to enable such persecutions, on such principles, even to pollute the current, much less to extinguish the source, of my consolations.

In the mean time, I look forwards with enraptured anticipation to a removal of these unenlightened operations, these vexatious encroachments, of a mistaken policy, by those gentle triumphs of religion and philosophy, which will hereafter bind the whole creation in one indissoluble tie of benevolence and peace: when all attempts to eradicate opinions. and produce conviction by oppressive force will be regarded as the very excess, not of injustice only, but of puerile delusion; as an extravagance no less disgraceful to humanity, than contradictory to common sense: and I now appeal, with entire confidence in the purity of my intentions and the intrinsic meritoriousness of my conduct, from rash and inapprehensive ignorance to the sober votaries of philosophy and letters; from the perturbed spirits of my delirious contemporaries to the unalarmed judgments of future generations; from the reversible formularies of transient judicatures to the unswerving tribunal of

changeless Truth; from the perishable dispensations of worldly polities to the constitutions of the everlasting Gospel; from the condemning sentence of frail and mistaken men, to the irrevocable decision of an absolving and applauding God.

APPENDIX. (F.)

THE

FIRST SATIRE OF JUVENAL

IMITATED.

1800.

STILL, still shall struggling SPLEEN repress her hand,

This spawn of scribblers croaking through the land? See Chalmers urge with persevering page

To doubt and dulness a discerning age?

See Reeves enjoy his pension and applause,

Who Freedom libell'd, and provok'd her laws?
With unindignant apathy pass by

Of Antijacobins the filthy stye?

Wars, murders, their elight; not G....'s more;
True priests of Moloc. gorg'd with human gore.
Their social Order, Sta's in in hurl'd;

Their Law, CONFUSION al ig through the world:
Their Faith, to bid Ged-wind Mercy cease,
And whoop War's el-hods at THE PRINCE OF
PEACE;

Raptur'd to view du en

in'd trophies nod

In frowns of horror o'er the shrine of GOD!

How plotting Priestley's grains of powder lie
To blow our Church in atoms to the sky;"

How crafty Tooke and bawling Thelwall plann'd
To make one mighty Chaos of the land,

To whelm wealth, titles, in Rebellion's flood,
And drench the scaffold with their Sovereign's blood;
How Paine builds equal rights on equal birth
With equal commonage o'er parent Earth;
Not, through the paths of bliss our steps to lead,
The naked clothe, sick cherish, hungry feed;
But, Nero-like, one vast combustion raise

Of Law, Rank, Order; and enjoy the blaze:-
Those countless crimes, which Windham's tongue can

tell,

Of quitted felons, genuine imps of hell:

On such stale themes, to me far better known,
Than house, and wife, and all I name my own,

2

a During the debate in the House of Commons in 1787, on the Repeal of the Test Act, one of the present writers heard Sir William Dolben, Member of Parliament for the University of Oxford, quote the following passage, to which Mr. Wakefield alludes, from Dr. Priestley. "the silent propagation of the truth will in the end prove efficacious. We are placing, as it were, grain by grain, a train of gunpowder, to which the match will one day be laid to blow up the fabric of error, which can never be again raised upon the same foundation."

The worthy Baronet now displayed his sagacity in detecting the design of the Philosopher, and, as in duty bound, alarmed the House by laying no common emphasis on every grain of the metaphorical combustible. Mr. Courtenay, whose pleasantry has so often relieved the tædium of parliamentary business, undertook to calm the apprehensions of the Representative of the University of Oxford, and reminded him that the deep design, whatever it might be, was only against "the fabric of error," and therefore Sir William must be satisfied that the Church of England could be in no danger.