488 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY, 



cepted, but such was the dread of his unpopularity that nobody would 

 let him have a house, from an apprehension that it would be burned 

 by the populace. He was obliged to get a friend to take the lease for 

 him, and it was with the utmost difficulty that he could prevail with 

 the landlord to transfer the lease to him, as he alleged that he was not 

 only afraid that it would be demolished, but that his own residence, 

 twenty miles oif, would go next. When he got settled, his friends 

 living near were advised to remove their valuable effects. Servants 

 could not be induced to stay with him, and his neighbors were in fear 

 of damage by his presence. The members of the Royal Society, of 

 which he was a fellow, declined admitting him to their company, and 

 he was obliged to withdraw his name from the Society. His eldest 

 son was in business in Manchester with a partner who, although a man 

 of liberality himself, was so panic-struck by the state of the public 

 mind that he dissolved the business connection. Dr. Priestley was 

 burned in effigy with Paine, and threatened and denounced in private 

 letters. At a dinner of the prebendaries of a cathedral church, the 

 conversation turning on the riots in Birmingham, and on a clergyman 

 having said that if Dr. Priestley were mounted on a pile of his publi- 

 cations he would set fire to them and burn him alive, they all declared 

 that they would be ready to do the same. Dr. Priestley had been a 

 friend of Edmund Burke, who wrote a furious book against the French. 

 This was replied to by Priestley so ably that the orator was greatly 

 exasperated and inveighed against his friend's character repeatedly in 

 the House of Commons. Dr. Priestley denied his charges, and called 

 on him for proof again and again, but he made no reply, whereupon 

 the doctor published that Burke " had neither ability to maintain his 

 cliarge nor virtue to retract it." Dr. Priestley was informed, by a per- 

 son who was boarding at the same house with Burke at Margate when 

 the riots broke out at Birmingham, " that he could not contain his joy, 

 but, running from place to place, he expressed it in the most une- 

 quivocal manner." 



The prolonged persecution to which Priestley was subjected after 

 the riots, and the extent and virulence of the feeling against him, show 

 that the affair was something more than the mere outbreak of the 

 Birmingham mob, and the course taken by government sufficiently 

 attests that the riotous populace were but the tools of their superiors. 

 While the country in general evidently exulted in his sufferings, the 

 representatives of the nation refused to inquire into the cause of them. 

 The courts delayed to give him the damages to which he was entitled, 

 and their award fell $10,000 short of his real loss. As an illustration of 

 the spirit which ruled the dispensation of justice, it may be mentioned 

 that the manuscript of a work on the Constitution of England, as large 

 as " Blackstone's Commentaries," was destroyed, and Priestley's own 

 lawyer advised him not to make a claim for it, because it would be ruled 

 as a seditious work and aggravate his case. Accordingly, this manu- 



