e very scrupulous
as to their measures. Certainly he was not who invented the
following character and arbitrarily applied it to Dr. Robison,
which might have been applied with as much propriety to any other
person in Europe or America. The character here referred to, is
taken from the American _Mercury_, printed at Hartford, September
26, 1799, by E. Babcock. In this paper, on the pretended authority
of Professor Ebeling, we are told "that Robison had lived too fast
for his income, and to supply deficiencies had undertaken to alter
a bank bill, that he was detected and fled to France; that having
been expelled the Lodge in Edinburgh, he applied in France for the
second grade, but was refused; that he made the same attempt in
Germany and afterwards in Russia, but never succeeded; and from
this entertained the bitterest hatred to masonry; and after
wandering about Europe for two years, by writing to Secretary
Dundas, and presenting a copy of his book, which, it was judged,
would answer certain purposes of the ministry, the prosecution
against him was stopped, the Professor returned in triumph to his
country, and now lives upon a handsome pension, instead of
suffering the fate of his predecessor Dodd."[2]

Payson goes on to quote a writer in _The National Intelligencer_ of
January 1801, who styles himself a "friend to truth" and speaks of
Professor Robison as "a man distinguished by abject dependence on a
party, by the base crimes of forgery and adultery, and by frequent
paroxysms of insanity." Mounier goes further still, and in his pamphlet
_De l'influence attribuee aux Philosophes, ... Francs-macons et ...
Illumines_, etc., inspired by the Illuminatus Bode, quotes a story that
Robison suffered from a form of insanity which consisted in his
believing that the posterior portion of his body was made of glass![3]

In support of all this farrago of nonsense there is of course no
foundation of truth; Robison was a well-known savant who lived sane and
respected to the end of his days. On his death Watt wrote of him: "He
was a man of the clearest head and the most science of anybody I have
ever known."[4] John Playfair, in a paper read before the Royal Society
of Edinburgh in 1815, whilst criticizing his _Proofs of a
Conspiracy_--though at the same time admitting he had himself never had
access to the documents Robison had consulted!-