while the dark, assassinating spirit of anonymous abuse has been busy in the public prints, and found means to assail and wound the tranquillity of your most private retirements.

From a country where you have met with injustice instead of reward, with calumny and persecution instead of praise and esteem, we cannot wonder you should depart.

The hope that in America you will find that Asylum which is here denied you; the confidence that a free country will receive a veteran son of liberty with all the respect that is due to his worth; the belief that those who have fought and bled for their own rights, will reverence one who has been deprived of his; the certainty that the implacable enemies of liberty will never permit you in this country to enjoy repose; and the strong suspicion that they would gladly seize an opportunity to aim not only at your personal freedom, but at your life itself, reconcile us to the prospect of your departure, by demonstrating its necessity.

Wherever you go, renown will attend you. In England alone are you calumniated. In every other land each grateful science will crowd around, and offer a garland to him whose genius has enlarged their sphere, or added to their stability. Liberty will warmly welcome you to any of her dominions. Virtue and Religion will hail, with joyful smiles, the arrival of their intrepid champion, their ardent votary.

We have, on a former melancholy occasion, expressed our sense of the services you rendered us. We expressed less than we felt, and we again send you our thanks. While tyranny will rejoice, while bigotry and superstition will clap their hands at your departure, all that have been enlightened by your labours will give, in the tribute of a silent tear, more than those powers, with all their boasted influence, can bestow on their most favourite vassals.

Though you depart, your labours remain. The propagation of truth is silent and slow, but it is irresistible. The seed that you have strewn around will not lie buried in the earth for ever. It is arising, and it will arise, till it ripen into a glorious harvest.

To your talents, your integrity, and love of truth, we shall,

while we live, bear testimony. We rejoice that of these no enemy can deprive you; while it will afford consolation to you to reflect that no virtuous effort you ever made can possibly be lost, it shall be some consolation to us that we have enjoyed, that we do still enjoy, so many of their effects.

Though the waters of a wide sea will soon roll between us, your example, your precepts, your principles, shall not be absent. These shall continue present in our minds, and shall inspire our conduct.

May He who curbs the ocean, who stills the wild winds and the tumultuous billows, grant you a prosperous passage, and safely land you on the shores of America!*

To MR. BENJAMIN FLOWER.†

DEAR SIR,

Clapton, March 26, 1794. I AM Concerned to find by your last Intelligencer that some person, willing to appear my friend, has ascribed to me a valuable improvement in the method of gilding, to which I have no pretension. It was practised long before I went to Birmingham, and I believe belongs to Mr. Boulton. Of him, at least, I first heard of it. By rectifying this mistake as soon as possible, you will oblige, dear Sir, yours sincerely.

Signed, by the unanimous desire of a numerous meeting of subscribers belonging to the two societies of Protestant Dissenters assembling in the Union Chapel, Livery Street-Radcliffe Scholefield, John Edwards." Ibid. p. 51.

+ Cambridge, with whom I enjoyed a long and intimate personal acquaintance till his decease, 1829, aged 74. See M. R. N. S., III. 210; "Public Principle essential to the Excellence of Private Character; a Funeral Sermon on occasion of the Death of Mr. B. Flower. By W. J. Fox "

Among Mr. Flower's various exertions as a public writer, to obtain "the greatest good of the greatest number," may be now, especially, worthy of notice, his early advocacy of "election by ballot," which, as he justly says, "strikes at the root of corruption," while "bribery naturally ceases, because the means will not answer the end." See "The French Constitution; with Remarks on some of its principal Articles, in which their Importance in a Political, Moral, and Religious point of view is illustrated, and the Necessity of a Reformation in Church and State in Great Britain enforced." Ed. 2, (1792,) p. 163; Exuminer, No. 1199, Jan. 23, 1831.

P. S. Give me leave to express the satisfaction I weekly receive from the temper and spirit of your paper, from which it may be hoped that much good will accrue to this country.

FROM THE SOCIETY OF UNITED IRISHMEN.

SIR, Dublin, March 28, 1794. SUFFER a society which has been calumniated as devoid of all sense of religion, law, or morality, to sympathize with one whom calumny of a similar kind is about to drive from his native land, a land which he has adorned and enlightened in almost every branch of liberal literature, and of useful philosophy. The emigration of Dr. Priestley will form a striking historical fact, by which alone future ages will learn to estimate truly the temper of the present times. Your departure will not only give evidence of the injury which philosophy and literature have received in your person, but will prove the accumulation of petty disquietudes which has robbed your life of its zest and enjoyment; for, at your age, no one would willingly embark on such a voyage; and sure we are, it was your own wish and prayer to be buried in your native country, which contains the dust of your old friends, Saville, Price, Jebb, and Fothergill. But be cheerful, dear Sir; you are going to a happier world, the world of Washington and Franklin.

In idea we accompany you. We stand near you, while you are setting sail. We watch your eyes that linger on the white cliffs, and we hear the patriarchal blessing which your soul pours out on the land of your nativity, the aspiration that ascends to God, for its peace, its freedom, and its prosperity. Again do we participate in your feelings on first beholding nature in her noblest scenes and grandest features, on finding man busied in rendering himself worthy of nature; but, more than all, on contemplating, with philosophic prescience, the coming period, when those vast inland seas shall be shadowed with sails; when the St. Lawrence and Mississipi shall stretch forth their arms to embrace the Continent in a great circle of

interior navigation; when the Pacific Ocean shall pour into the Atlantic; when man will become more precious than fine gold, and when his ambition shall be to subdue the elements, not to subjugate his fellow-creatures; to make fire, water, earth, and air, obey his bidding, but to leave the pure ethereal mind, as the sole thing in nature free and incoercible.

Happy indeed would it be, were men in power to recollect this quality of the human mind. Suffer us to give them an example from a science of which you are a mighty master; that attempts to fix the element of mind only increase its activity, and that to calculate what may be from what has been is a very dangerous deceit. Were all the saltpetre in India monopolized, this would only make chemical researches more ardent and successful. The chalky earths would be searched for it, and nitre-beds would be made in every cellar and every stable. Did not that prove sufficient, the genius of chemistry would find in a new salt a substitute for nitre, or a power superior to it. It requires greater genius than Mr. Pitt seems to possess, to know the wonderful resources of mind, when patriotism animates philosophy, and all the arts and sciences are put under a state of requisition; when the attention of a whole scientific people is bent to multiplying the means and instruments of destruction; and when philosophy rises in a mass to drive on the wedge of war. A black powder has changed the military art, and in a great degree the manners of mankind. Why may not the same science which produced it produce another powder, which, inflamed under a certain compression, might impel the air, so as to shake down the strongest towers, and scatter destruction?

But you are going to a country where science is turned to better uses. Your change of place will give room for the matchless activity of your genius; and you will take a sublime pleasure in bestowing on Britain the benefit of your future discoveries. As matter changes its form, but not a particle is

• "M. Bertholet discovered that oxygenated muriated gas, received in a ley of caustic pot-ash, forms a crytalizable neutral salt, which detonates more strongly than nitre."

ever lost, so the principles of virtuous minds are equally imperishable; and your change of situation may even render truth more operative, knowledge more productive, and in the event, liberty itself more universal. Wafted by the winds, or tossed by the waves, the seed that is here thrown out as dead, there shoots up and flourishes. It is probable that emigration to America, from the first settlement downward, has not only served the cause of general liberty, but will eventually and circuitously serve it, even in Britain. What mighty events have arisen from that germ, which might once have been supposed to be lost for ever in the woods of America, but, thrown upon the bosom of nature, the breath of God revived it, and the world hath gathered its fruits!

Even Ireland has contributed her share to the liberties of America; and while purblind statesmen were happy to get rid of the stubborn Presbyterians of the north, they little thought that they were serving a good cause in another quarter. Yes, the volunteers of Ireland still live; they live across the Atlantic. Let this idea animate us in our sufferings; and may the pure principles and genuine lustre of the British constitution, reflected from their coasts, penetrate into our cells and our dungeons.

Farewell, great and good man! great by your mental powers, by your multiplied literary labours, but still greater by those household virtues which form the only solid security for public conduct, by those mild and gentle qualities which, far from being averse to, are most frequently attended with severe and inflexible patriotism, rising like an oak above a modest mansion. Farewell; but before you go, we beseech a portion of your parting prayer to the Author of good for Archibald Hamilton Rowan, the pupil of Jebb, our brother, now suffering imprisonment,† and for all those who have suffered, and are about to suffer, in the same cause; the cause of impartial and

* At Cambridge.

"For two years," according to the sentence, Feb. 7, with “ a fine of 500/." He had been convicted, Jan. 30, of signing, as secretary," and "publishing, an Address from the United Irishmen of Dublin to the Volunteers of Ireland." N. A. Reg. XV. (6—9.)