I JOSEPH PRIESTLEY 11 



the outburst of long-pent-up social fires. Men's 

 feelings were excited in a way that we, in this 

 generation, can hardly comprehend. Party wrath 

 and virulence were expressed in a manner un- 

 paralleled, and it is to be hoped impossible, in our 

 times ; and Priestley and his friends were held up 

 to public scorn, even in Parliament, as fomenters 

 of sedition. A " Church-and-King " cry was 

 raised against the Liberal Dissenters; and, in 

 Birmingham, it was intensified and specially 

 directed towards Priestley by a local controversy, 

 in which he had engaged with his usual vigour. 

 In 1791, the celebration of the second anniversary 

 of the taking of the Bastille by a public dinner, 

 with which Priestley had nothing whatever to do, 

 gave the signal to the loyal and pious mob, who, 

 unchecked, and indeed to some extent encouraged, 

 by those who were responsible for order, had the 

 town at their mercy for three days. The chapels 

 and houses of the leading Dissenters were 

 wrecked, and Priestley and his family had to fly 

 for their lives, leaving library, apparatus, papers, 

 and all their possessions, a prey to the flames. 



Priestley never returned to Birmingham. He 

 bore the outrages and losses inflicted upon him 

 with extreme patience and sweetness, 1 and betook 



1 Even Mrs. Priestley, who might be forgiven for regarding 

 the destroyers of her household gods with some asperity, 

 contents herself, in writing to Mrs. Barbauld, with the sarcasm 

 that the Birmingham people "will scarcely find so many 

 respectable characters, a second time, to make a bonfire of." 



