Toland was only twenty-six when he published his first book, but, to judge from the correspondence between Locke and Molyneux, he was vain and indiscreet. "He has raised against him," says the latter from Dublin (May 27th, 1697), "the clamours of all parties; and this not so much by his difference in opinion as by his unseasonable way of discoursing, propagating, and maintaining it." Again (September 11th, 1697): "Mr. T. is at last driven out of the kingdom; the poor gentleman, by his imprudent management, had raised such an universal outcry that it was even dangerous for a man to have been known once to converse with him. This made all men wary of reputation decline seeing him; insomuch that at last he wanted a meal's meat (as I am told), and none would admit him to their tables. The little stock of money which he brought into the country being exhausted, he fell to borrowing from any one that would lend him half-a-crown, and ran in debt for his wigs, clothes, and lodging." Then when the Parliament ordered him to be taken into custody, and to be prosecuted, he very wisely fled the country, suffering only a temporary rebuff, and writing many other books, political and religious, none of which ever attained the distinction of his first.
But it was in the struggle between the Church and Dissent that the party-spirit of Queen Anne's reign chiefly manifested itself in the burning of books. No one fought for the cause of Dissent with greater energy or greater personal loss than the famous Defoe, the author of Robinson Crusoe. It brought him to ruin, and one of his books to the hangman.
It would seem that his Shortest Way with the Dissenters (1702), which ironically advocated their extermination, was in answer to a sermon preached at Oxford by Sacheverell in June of the same year, called The Political Union, wherein he alluded to a party against whom all friends of the Anglican Church "ought to hang out the bloody flag and banner of defiance." Defoe's pamphlet so exactly accorded with the sentiments of the High Church party against the Dissenters that the extent of their applause at first was only equalled by that of their subsequent fury when the true author and his true object came to be known. Parliament ordered the work to be burnt by the hangman, and Defoe was soon afterwards sentenced to a ruinous fine and imprisonment, and to three days' punishment in the pillory. It was on this occasion that he wrote his famous Hymn to the Pillory, which he distributed among the spectators, and from which (as it is somewhat long) I quote a few of the more striking lines:—
"Hail, Hieroglyphick State machine,
Contrived to punish fancy in;
Men that are men in thee can feel no pain,
And all thy insignificants disdain.
. . . . . . .
Here by the errors of the town
The fools look out and knaves look on.
. . . . . . .
Actions receive their tincture from the times,
And, as they change, are virtues made or crimes.
Thou art the State-trap of the Law,
But neither can keep knaves nor honest men in awe.
. . . . . . .
Thou art no shame to Truth and Honesty,
Nor is the character of such defaced by thee,
Who suffer by oppression's injury.
Shame, like the exhalations of the Sun,
Falls back where first the motion was begun,
And they who for no crime shall on thy brows appear,
Bear less reproach than they who placed them there."
