PRIESTLEY. 427 



find him desiring the answers to letters he was 

 writing might be sent to the care of Messrs. Perregaux 

 at Paris. The revolution of Fructidor, however (4th 

 September, 1797), put an end to all prospects of peace, 

 and the war soon raged in every quarter with re- 

 doubled fury. He seems now to have derived his chief 

 comfort from tracing the fancied resemblance between 

 the events passing before him and the prophecies in 

 Scripture ; though occasionally he felt much puzzled, 

 and the book of Daniel, especially, appears to have 

 given him trouble and perplexity. When the peace 

 came at last, his health was too much broken to 

 permit any plans to be executed such as he had four 

 years before contemplated. 



In 1802 he became a confirmed invalid, suffer- 

 ing from internal, and apparently organic, derange- 

 ment. His illness was long and lingering, and he 

 suffered great pain with perfect patience for two 

 years. The prospect of death which he had before 

 him did not relax his application to literary labour, 

 his faculties remaining entire to the last. Neither did 

 that awful certainty, ever present to his mind, affect 

 him with sorrow or dismay. The same unshaken 

 belief in a future state, the same confident hope of 

 immortal life which had supported him under his 

 affliction for the death of others, cheered him while 

 contemplating the approach of his own. In this 

 happy frame of mind he gently expired on the 6th of 

 February, 1804, in the seventy-second year of his age. 



His character is a matter of no doubt, and it is of a 

 high order. That he was a most able, most indus- 

 trious, most successful student of nature, is clear ; and 



