er Treatise," has fixed on the atheist a moral
obligation to inquire into the truth of religion; but, said he, might not
the disciples of Irving, by the same rule, oblige us to an inquiry into
the supposed evidences of their favourite doctrine that Christ is about
to appear and to reign personally on earth? Might not even the Mahometan
suppose in the Christian a similar necessity as it relates to the
pretensions of the false prophet?' If Joseph Gurney sent for W. Y. to
converse with Dr. Chalmers as a genial spirit, surely the name of one so
honourable and of one so friendly both to my father and myself should not
be omitted. W. Y. loved a joke. He was very stout, and wore tight black
knee breeches with shoes and silk stockings. I remember how he made me
laugh one day as he described what happened to his knee-breeches as he
stooped to tie up his shoes ere attending a place of worship. To cut a
long story short, I may add W. Youngman did not go to church that day.
Originally I think he was a dyer.

Harriet Martineau, as all the world knows, was born at Norwich. In her
somewhat ill-natured autobiography she writes: 'Norwich, which has now no
social claims to superiority at all, was in my childhood a rival of
Lichfield itself, in the time of the Sewards, for literary pretensions
and the vulgarity of pedantry. William Taylor was then at his best, when
there was something like fulfilment of his early promise, when his
exemplary filial duty was a fine spectacle to the whole city, and before
the vice which destroyed him had coarsened his morale and destroyed his
intellect. During the war it was a great distinction to know anything of
German literature, and in Mr. Taylor's case it proved a ruinous
distinction. He was completely spoiled by the flatteries of shallow men,
pedantic women, and conceited lads.' Yet this man was the friend of
Southey and opened up a new world to the English intellect, and perhaps
in days to come will have a more enduring reputation than Harriet
Martineau herself. The lady does not err on the side of good nature in
her criticism. All she can say of Dr. Sayers is: 'I always heard of him
as a genuine scholar, and I have no doubt he was superior to his
neighbours in modesty and manners. Dr. Enfield, a feeble and superficial
man of letters, was gone also from the literary supper-table before my
time. There was Sir James Smith, the botanist, made much of and really
not pedantic and vulgar like