JOSEPH PRIESTLEY. HI 



shuddered at 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 unparalleled, and 

 it is to be hoped impossible, in oar 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,* and betook himself to London. 

 But even his scientific colleagues gave him a cold shoul- 



* Even Mrs. Priestley, who might be forgiven for regarding the destroy- 

 ers 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 bon- 

 fire of." 



