ticism, and that he had bent his pride so far down as to put his
apostasy out to hire.(44) The paper left behind him, called _Thoughts on
Religion_, is merely a set of excuses for not professing disbelief. He
says of his sermons that he preached pamphlets: they have scarce a
Christian characteristic; they might be preached from the steps of a
synagogue, or the floor of a mosque, or the box of a coffee-house almost.
There is little or no cant--he is too great and too proud for that; and, in
so far as the badness of his sermons goes, he is honest. But having put
that cassock on, it poisoned him: he was strangled in his bands. He goes
through life, tearing, like a man possessed with a devil. Like Abudah in
the Arabian story, he is always looking out for the Fury, and knows that
the night will come and the inevitable hag with it. What a night, my God,
it was! what a lonely rage and long agony--what a vulture that tore the
heart of that giant!(45) It is awful to think of the great sufferings of
this great man. Through life he always seems alone, somehow. Goethe was
so. I can't fancy Shakespeare otherwise. The giants must live apart. The
kings can have no company. But this man suffered so; and deserved so to
suffer. One hardly reads anywhere of such a pain.

The "saeva indignatio" of which he spoke as lacerating his heart, and
which he dares to inscribe on his tombstone--as if the wretch who lay under
that stone waiting God's judgement had a right to be angry--breaks out from
him in a thousand pages of his writing, and tears and rends him. Against
men in office, he having been overthrown; against men in England, he
having lost his chance of preferment there, the furious exile never fails
to rage and curse. Is it fair to call the famous _Drapier's Letters_
patriotism? They are masterpieces of dreadful humour and invective: they
are reasoned logically enough too, but the proposition is as monstrous and
fabulous as the Lilliputian island. It is not that the grievance is so
great, but there is his enemy--the assault is wonderful for its activity
and terrible rage. It is Samson, with a bone in his hand, rushing on his
enemies and felling them: one admires not the cause so much as the
strength, the anger, the fury of the champion. As is the case with madmen,
certain subjects provoke him, and awaken his fits of wrath. Marriage is
one of these; in a hundred passages in his writings he rages against it;
rages against children; an object