ENGLISH
MEN OF SCIENCE

EDITED BY
J. REYNOLDS GREEN, D.Sc.

JOSEPH PRIESTLEY

All Rights Reserved

J Priestley

JOSEPH PRIESTLEY

BY
T. E. THORPE, F.R.S.
AUTHOR OF
HUMPHRY DAVY, POET AND PHILOSOPHER
ETC., ETC.

PUBLISHED IN LONDON BY
J. M. DENT & CO., AND IN NEW
YORK BY E. P. DUTTON & CO.
1906

PREFACE

In the following account of the life and work of that “hero and type of the intellectual energy of the eighteenth century”—the “honest heretic”—Joseph Priestley, I have, to a considerable extent, made the subject of it tell his own story. After Priestley’s death there was found among his papers a short autobiography, dealing with the main events of his life up to the time of his settlement in America. This was subsequently published, with additions and explanatory notes, by his eldest son. Of this biography I have made full use, considering it, of course, as the best authority on the matters to which it refers.

For the account of the Warrington Academy, with which institution Priestley was connected for some years, and which connection profoundly affected his career, I am mainly indebted to Mr Henry A. Bright’s paper in the Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 1858-59.

The Yates papers in the possession of the Royal Society have also afforded me much assistance, and have been freely drawn upon.

I am also indebted to the late Mr Henry Carrington Bolton’s collection for certain letters and for information concerning the Lunar Society of Birmingham.

For the graphic account of the Birmingham Riots of 1791, when Priestley’s house was wrecked, and his library and laboratory destroyed, as described by an eye-witness, Miss Martha Russell, I have to express my obligations to her relative, Dr W. J. Russell, who first made me acquainted with her narrative. I am also indebted to Dr Russell for a copy of the print from which has been prepared the illustration showing the destruction of Priestley’s house.

I desire also to acknowledge my indebtedness to Dr Aikin for permission to publish certain of Priestley’s letters to his distinguished connection, Mrs Barbauld.

I am further under obligations to Lady Priestley, Lady Roscoe and Mr Sydney Lupton for much useful assistance.

The portrait of Priestley, which forms the frontispiece, has been reproduced in photogravure from the painting by Artaud, now in Dr Williams’ Theological Library in Gordon Square. I have to thank the Trustees of the Library for their kindness in allowing the copy to be made.

T. E. T.

London: May 1906.

CONTENTS

PAGE [Chapter I] 1 Birth—Parentage—Home Life—Early Education. [Chapter II] 17 Enters the Daventry Academy to be trained for the Ministry—Goes to Needham Market—His Life, Work and Privations there. [Chapter III] 30 Goes to Nantwich—Starts a School—Is appointed a Tutor in the Warrington Academy—Life at Warrington. [Chapter IV] 45 Priestley marries—Is ordained—His Essay on Education—Lectures on History and General Policy—His Chart of Biography—Becomes a Doctor of Laws of the University of Edinburgh—His visits to London—Makes the acquaintance of Dr Price, Canton and Benjamin Franklin—Writes the History of Electricity—Is elected into the Royal Society. [Chapter V] 66 Goes to Leeds as minister of the Mill Hill Chapel—Resumes his studies in Speculative Theology—The Theological Repository—Becomes a Unitarian—Priestley as a controversialist—His Theory and Practice of Perspective—His literary characteristics—Begins his inquiries on Pneumatic Chemistry—His invention of soda-water—Receives the Copley Medal of the Royal Society. [Chapter VI] 82 Becomes literary companion to Lord Shelburne—Goes abroad—His visit to Paris—His scientific work at Calne and in London—Continues his theological and metaphysical studies—His growing unpopularity—Leaves Lord Shelburne. [Chapter VII] 89 Removes to London—Declines a pension—Renews his acquaintance with Franklin—Goes to Birmingham—Becomes a member of the Lunar Society. [Chapter VIII] 103 Priestley at Birmingham—His theological work there—His love of literature—His catholicity—His personal characteristics. [Chapter IX] 120 The Birmingham riots of 1791. [Chapter X] 145 Determines to leave England—His arrival in America—Settles in Northumberland—His closing days—His death. [Chapter XI] 167 Priestley as a man of science—His characteristics as a philosopher—Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air—His discovery of the influence of vegetation on vitiated air—Atmospheric air not elementary—His researches on nitric oxide—Eudiometry—Nitrous oxide—Discovers hydrogen chloride—Prepares oxygen from nitre (1771)—Isolates ammonia gas—Discovers sulphur dioxide—Dephlogisticated air (oxygen)—Discovers silicon fluoride—Intra-diffusion of gases—Respiration—Priestley’s opinions of the value of experimental science in education—Discovers nitrosulphuric acid—Notes the constancy of composition of the atmosphere—Prepares chlorine—Sound in “air”—Experiments relating to phlogiston—The seeming conversion of water into air—Watt and the compound nature of water—Discovers sulphuretted hydrogen—Priestley’s confession of faith in phlogiston. [Index] 225

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

[Joseph Priestley, from the portrait in Dr Williams’ Library by Artaud (Photogravure)] Frontispiece [Birthplace of Priestley, from a drawing by J. A. Symington after a photograph] page 5 [The Pillaging of Priestley’s House during the Birmingham Riots] facing page 120

Joseph Priestley

CHAPTER I

Birth—Parentage—Home Life—Early Education

“If,” says Mr Frederic Harrison, “we choose one man as a type of the intellectual energy of the eighteenth century we could hardly find a better than Joseph Priestley, though his was not the greatest mind of the century. His versatility, eagerness, activity and humanity; the immense range of his curiosity in all things, physical, moral or social; his place in science, in theology, in philosophy and in politics; his peculiar relation to the Revolution, and the pathetic story of his unmerited sufferings, may make him the hero of the eighteenth century.”

In these few lines Mr Harrison has indicated, in terms sufficiently precise, the leading features in the character and life-history of one of the most remarkable men of the eighteenth century. To what extent he may be regarded as a hero and as a type of the intellectual energy of that century it is the purpose of the following pages to make clear.

Joseph Priestley was born at Fieldhead, in the parish of Birstall, near Leeds, on March 13 (Old Style), 1733.[1] He was named after his paternal grandfather, “an eminent tradesman, as much famed for his heavenly conduct as his grandson (Joseph) has since been for natural abilities.”

“The Priestleys,” writes Madame Belloc, the great-granddaughter of the subject of this memoir, in her charming essay, “Joseph Priestley in Domestic Life” (Contemporary Review, October 1894), “were of an old Presbyterian stock; one branch of the family acquired wealth and lived at Whiteways, but his (Joseph’s) own immediate ancestors were farmers and clothiers, people of substance in the yeoman class. We can trace them accurately as far as the middle of the seventeenth century, when one Phœbe Priestley, after wrestling with fever in her household, was herself stricken, and ‘lay like a lamb before the Lord’ on her deathbed. Her husband wrote a long and touching account of all she said and did, that her children might know what manner of mother they had lost. These people were presumably of the same stock as the Priestleys of Soylands, who ran back into the Middle Ages.

“The children of the Priestley families were all named after scriptural characters. They were Josephs, Timothys and Sarahs from one generation to another. The Bible was stamped into them, and from it they drew all the inspiration of their lives.”

Joseph Priestley the elder was born in 1660, and died on August 2, 1745. He married Sarah Healey and had by her eight children, five sons and three daughters, of whom Jonas, the father of Joseph Priestley the younger, born about 1700, was the seventh child and fourth son. Jonas Priestley married Mary, a daughter of Joseph Swift, a farmer and maltster of Shafton, near Wakefield, and had by her six children, four sons and two daughters, of whom Joseph was the eldest and Timothy the second; Martha, the elder girl, who died in 1812, married John Crouch, and was left a widow in poor circumstances in 1786. Another member of the Priestley family who requires mention for the purpose of this narrative is Sarah, the sister of Jonas and second daughter of Joseph Priestley the elder. She was born in 1692 and married John Keighley—“a man who had distinguished himself for his zeal for religion and for his public spirit.” She was left a widow in 1745. Three years before this she took her nephew Joseph, the subject of this memoir, to live with her, and “was fond of him in the extreme.” She died in 1764. Her brother John, Joseph Priestley the younger’s uncle, died on February 28, 1786, aged ninety-two. “He was a remarkable man and of a singularly happy constitution, both of body and mind.”

This happy constitution of body and mind seems indeed to have been a characteristic of many members of the family, the several branches of which were remarkably healthy and long-lived.

Priestley says of his father Jonas that he had uniformly better spirits than any man he ever knew, and by this means was as happy towards the close of life, when reduced to poverty and dependent upon others, as in his best days. These facts are not without interest as serving to account for much that we shall have occasion to note in the character and temperament of the subject of this biography.

Fieldhead, the house in which he first saw the light, had been occupied by the family for several generations. It was a small two-storey building, built of stone and slated with flag, similar in character to many of the houses still standing in the district, the long, low windows in the upper storeys betokening that they were formerly occupied by weavers. It was last lived in by Martha Priestley (Mrs Crouch), but on the death of her husband in 1786 was abandoned by the family, and, falling into decay, was pulled down about fifty years ago.

The Priestleys were a simple, sober, honest, God-fearing folk, staunch Calvinists, and deeply religious. Jonas Priestley was a manufacturer of “home-spun”—a weaver and cloth dresser—two trades now distinct but then practised in common—who took his week’s work on ass-back, on roads little better than bridle-paths, to the Sunday market in Leeds. He was of a class characteristic of the district.

These hand-loom weavers, who lived in the hill country lying to the west of Leeds, were generally men of small capitals; they often annexed a small farm to their business, or possessed a field or two on which to support a horse and cow, and were for the most part blessed with the comforts without the superfluities of life. During five or six days of the week they dwelt in their own little village, among trees and fields, taking no thought of the outside world and contenting themselves with the homely gossip of their farmstead or hamlet. On market day they came into the town in shoals, clad in their quaint corduroy breeches, broad-brimmed hats, and brass-buttoned coats of antique cut, bringing their produce on pack-horses, to await the visits of the merchants—the commercial aristocracy of Leeds, then a town of some 16,000 or 17,000 inhabitants—who were the agents through which the outer world received its supply of Yorkshire woollen goods. They were a shrewd, careful race, somewhat stolid and slow of speech and not given to great mental briskness or activity, keenly appreciative of the blessings of liberty and usually in sympathy with the political party to whom the cause of liberty was for the moment entrusted; sober, godly souls for the most part; regular in their attendance at public worship, and upon the whole preferring the plebeian zeal of the Chapel to the aristocratic repose of the Church.[2]

BIRTHPLACE OF PRIESTLEY.

And what a world it was in which they thus serenely dwelt apart.

“It was,” writes Madame Belloc, “the time of Louis the Fifteenth in France and of George the Second in England, and the nephews and nieces of Charlotte Princess Palatine were still living, and her letters, whose name is legion, yet lay stored in the cabinets of her correspondents, full of inexpressible details discussed in most expressive language. It was the time when Jeanie Deans walked from Scotland to beg her sister’s life of Queen Caroline, and met Madge Wildfire in the way. It was the time when the polite world was composed of ‘men, women and Herveys’; when Squire Pendarves was found dead in his bed in Greek Street, Soho, leaving his young widow to be courted by John Wesley and wedded by Dr Delany; when statesmen bribed, and young blades drank, and Sir Harbottle carried off Harriet Byron, whose shrieks brought Sir Charles Grandison to the rescue, sword in hand. It was the period when the Jacobite Rebellion flamed up and expired; when the Young Pretender marched to Derby and the heads of the decapitated lords were exposed on Temple Bar; tragedies, agonies, highway robberies, Dick Turpin, Jack Sheppard, smugglers, the press-gang; Frederick Prince of Wales quarrelling in Leicester Square; Queen Caroline on her death-bed telling her weeping little George, ‘que l’un n’empêche pas l’autre’; Horace Walpole making the grand tour; Dean Swift dying in agonised misery. Merciful Heavens! What an England, of which we possess the daily diary! We can see Hogarth at his easel, and Sir Joshua taking his first stiff portraits, and Garrick going on pilgrimage to Stratford, and the young king courting Hannah Lightfoot and marrying his little bride from Mecklenburg. Without too much verifying of dates it is certain that all this was happening before Dr Priestley was thirty years of age, and that of none of it is there the faintest mention in the account he has drawn up of his own childhood, youth and young manhood, though he was himself destined to be one of the principal illustrations of the Georgian era. For anything which appears to the contrary, he and his friends might have dwelt in some far-distant planet whose inhabitants were wholly given up to study and to prayer.”

Priestley says of his father that he had a strong sense of religion, praying with his family morning and evening, and carefully teaching his children and servants the Assembly’s Catechism, which was all the system of which he had any knowledge.

“In the latter part of his life he became very fond of Mr Whitfield’s writings and other works of a similar kind, having been brought up in the principles of Calvinism, and adopting them, but without ever giving much attention to matters of speculation, and entertaining no bigoted aversion to those who differed from him on the subject.”

We may well imagine that Jonas, with his “strong sense of religion,” was one of that earnest band of “several hundreds of plain people” who listened, spellbound, to the eloquence of John Wesley on that memorable day of May 1742, on which, on Birstall Hill, began the great Yorkshire “Revival.”

Of his wife, “a woman of exemplary piety,” the mother of the future philosopher, little has been recorded beyond the fragmentary notice in her son’s autobiography. He says of her:—

“It is but little that I can recollect of my mother. I remember, however, that she was careful to teach me the Assembly’s Catechism, and to give me the best instructions the little time that I was at home. Once in particular, when I was playing with a pin, she asked me where I got it; and on telling her that I found it at my uncle’s, who lived very near to my father, and where I had been playing with my cousins, she made me carry it back again; no doubt to impress my mind, as it could not fail to do, with a clear idea of the distinction of property and of the importance of attending to it. She died in the hard winter of 1739,[3] not long after being delivered of my youngest brother; and having dreamed a little before her death that she was in a delightful place, which she particularly described and imagined to be heaven, the last words which she spake, as my aunt informed me, were, ‘Let me go to that fine place.’”

During some considerable portion of his mother’s short period of married life, Joseph Priestley, together with his brother Timothy, was committed to the care of his grandfather Swift, with whom he remained with little interruption until his mother’s death. From this we may infer that the domestic circumstances of his parents were far from easy, or that the accommodation at Fieldhead was unequal to the support of the cloth-dresser’s rapidly-increasing family.

Timothy, who, after following his father’s business as a cloth-dresser for a time, became an Independent minister, and died in London, has left us reminiscences of his brother’s boyhood. He seems to have been particularly impressed with his ability to repeat the Assembly’s Catechism “without missing a word,” and by being made to kneel down with him while he prayed. “This was not at bed-time, which he never neglected, but in the course of the day.”

On the death of his mother, the eldest boy, then barely six years old, was taken home and sent to school in the neighbourhood. Luckily for him, his Aunt Sarah, Mrs Keighley, “a truly pious and excellent woman, who knew no other use of wealth, or of talents of any kind, than to do good, and who never spared herself for this purpose,” being childless, offered, in 1742, to relieve her brother Jonas of all care for his eldest son by taking entire charge of him. “From this time,” says her nephew, “she was truly a parent to me, till her death in 1764.”

John Keighley was a man of considerable property, and at his death, which occurred when Priestley was about twelve years of age, the widow was left with the greater part of his fortune for life, and much of it at her disposal after her death.

By Mrs Keighley’s direction he was sent, he tells us, to several schools in the neighbourhood, especially to a large free school under the care of a clergyman, Mr Hague, under whom, at the age of twelve or thirteen, he first began to make progress in Latin and acquired the elements of Greek. His brother Timothy records that “from eleven to about thirteen he had read most of Mr Bunyan’s works and other authors on religion, besides the common Latin authors.”

How a well-ordered school was conducted in the middle of the eighteenth century may be gleaned from the following regulations in force in Mr Canton’s well-known academy in 1745:—

1. That the School hours are from 7 o’clock in the morning till 12, and from 2 to 5 in the afternoon: except the winter half-year, when they begin at 8 in the morning.

2. That all the Scholars come decently, that is, with their Hands and Faces wash’d, their Hair or Perriwigs Comb’d, and their Shoes black’d.

3. That they bow at Coming in and going out, and when any Thing is given or rec’d; and never wear their Hats in the House or School.

4. That they loiter not, but go immediately to their own seats and move not thence, without Leave, till School is done.

5. That if any Person come into the School whom they know, they are to get up, make a bow, and sit down in their places again.

6. That if the Master be discoursing with, or reading to any Person, they shall not stare Confidently on them or hearken to their Talk, unless required to be present.

7. That they shall not interrupt the Master while a Stranger is talking with him, with any Question, request, or complaint whatsoever, but stay till he is at Leisure.

8. That they shall not presume to talk loud nor make any noise in getting their lessons. A Boy’s Tongue should never be heard, but in saying his Lesson, asking or Answering a Question.

9. That there be no buying, selling, changing, laying Wagers or Gaming in School-time, on the forfeiture of the whole so bought or sold, etc.

10. That those who learn French shall not speak English to any that learn French, on the Forfeiture of ye Bill, or one Hour’s Exercize after School Time.

11. That such as learn Latin are also oblig’d not to speak other Language to those that learn it, during School time, on the Penalty last mentioned.

12. That all perform their Lessons and Exercises in fair Writing and true Spelling, and likewise prepare themselves for their Examinations in French, Latin, Accounts and Catechisms every week, both in School times and all Vacations.

13. That such as perform well, shall be prefer’d according to their Merit, and shall have liberty to leave School before the usual Time; but such as are Negligent herein, shall have their Exercizes to write over again after School.

14. That none presume to call any Party or Nick-names nor give any ill or reproachful Language, much less Curse, Sware, or Lye, but in all things behave in a quiet, peaceable, and civil manner.

15. That the Boarders shall not go beyond y^e bounds belonging to y^e House on any pretence whatsoever without leave, on the forfeiture of 6d. or two Hours’ Exercize after School for Every such Offence.

16. That one Scholar is not to strike another, or challenge him to fight; but in case of any Difference shall acquaint the Master therewith and be satisfied with his Determination.

Whilst acquiring Greek at the public school, Priestley learned Hebrew on holidays of the Dissenting minister of the place, Mr Kirkby, under whose care he eventually came.

The weakly, consumptive habit into which he now fell necessitated his withdrawal from school. His fondness for books had led his aunt to encourage the hope that he might be trained for the ministry, and he readily entered into her views.

“But,” he says, “my ill health obliged me to turn my thoughts another way, and, with a view to trade, I learned the modern languages, French, Italian and High Dutch [German], without a master; and in the first and last of them I translated and wrote letters for an uncle of mine who was a merchant, and who intended to put me into a counting-house in Lisbon.”

Indeed, he says a house was actually engaged to receive him there, and everything was nearly ready for his undertaking the voyage when his health so far improved that the idea of the ministry was resumed. During the two years in which he had been kept away from school the boy was thrown almost entirely upon his own resources. It says much for the activity and eagerness of his mind, his diligence and his power of mental acquisitiveness, that he should have neglected no opportunity of gaining knowledge from the various heretical divines who came to drink a dish of tea with his aunt. He tells us that from Mr Haggerstone, a Dissenting minister in the neighbourhood, who had been educated under Maclaurin, and whom he visited twice a week, he learned geometry, algebra and various branches of mathematics, theoretical and practical. He also read, with but little assistance from him, Gravesend’s Elements of Natural Philosophy, Watts’s Logic, and Locke’s Essay on the Human Understanding. “He also gave lessons in Hebrew to a Baptist minister at Gildersome, a village about four miles from Leeds, and by that means made himself ‘a considerable proficient in that language.’” “At the same time I learned Chaldee and Syriac, and just began to read Arabic.”

As his knowledge increased, and the powers of his intellect strengthened, he began to exercise his reason upon the many problems of doctrine and religious belief which could not fail to be uppermost in his mind when his upbringing and the environment in which circumstances had placed him are considered. His aunt, although a strict Calvinist, was a large-minded woman, and, as her nephew says, “far from confining salvation to those who thought as she did on religious subjects.”

“Her home,” he says, “was the resort of all the dissenting ministers in the neighbourhood, without distinction, and those who were the most obnoxious, on account of their heresy, were almost as welcome to her, if she thought them honest and good men (which she was not unwilling to do), as any others.”

Although all the religious books that came in his way tended to confirm him in the principles of Calvinism, he was led by the natural vigour of his mind, and by an innate spirit of philosophical optimism, which strengthened with advancing years, to feel a repugnance to its gloomy tenets, and to question the sufficiency and reasonableness of much of its doctrine. The conversation of the heretical divines in whose company he was thrown served, moreover, to awaken inquiry and to increase his doubts. These divines were for the most part men who, in liberality of thought, were far in advance of the congregations they served, and this was especially the case of those for whose attainments and character the discerning boy had most respect.

The youth, who as a child had lisped at his mother’s knee, “without missing a word,” the formularies of the Assembly’s Catechism, was now tortured with doubt and misgiving as he strove to penetrate into and to realise the meaning of the phrases his memory so tenaciously retained. And the more he read and the more he pondered the more disquieted he became.

“Having,” he says, “read many books of experiences, and, in consequence, believing that a new birth, produced by the immediate agency of the Spirit of God, was necessary to salvation, and not being able to satisfy myself that I had experienced anything of the kind, I felt occasionally such distress of mind as it is not in my power to describe, and which I still look back upon with horror. Notwithstanding I had nothing very material to reproach myself with, I often concluded that God had forsaken me, and that mine was like the case of Francis Spira, to whom, as he imagined, repentance and salvation were denied. In that state of mind I remember reading the account of the man in the iron cage in the Pilgrim’s Progress with the greatest perturbation.”

“I imagine,” he continues, “that even these conflicts of mind were not without their use, as they led me to think habitually of God and a future state. And though my feelings were then, no doubt, too full of terror, what remained of them was a deep reverence for divine things, and in time a pleasing satisfaction which can never be effaced, and I hope was strengthened as I have advanced in life and acquired more rational notions of religion. The remembrance, however, of what I sometimes felt in that state of ignorance and darkness gives me a peculiar sense of the value of rational principles of religion, and of which I can give but an imperfect description to others.”

At the time he was greatly distressed that he could not feel a proper repentance for the sin of Adam, taking it for granted, he says, that without this it could not be forgiven him. The fact was that, under the influence of his friends, Haggerstone and Walker, he was insensibly following Baxter in attempting to reconcile the doctrines of Arminius and Calvin, and he ended by embracing those of Arminius. It was repugnant to his sense of equity and justice that, in the words of his Catechism, “All mankind, by the fall of our first parents, lost communion with God, are under his wrath and curse, and so made liable to all miseries in this life, to death itself, and to the pains of hell for ever.”

His first trial of faith came when he applied for admission as a communicant in the congregation which he had always attended. The old minister was willing enough to receive him, but the elders, who had the government of the church, discovering this unsoundness on the subject of the sin of Adam, stoutly refused to sanction his admission.

Whilst the taint of heresy appears not to have greatly distressed the worthy Mrs Keighley, it doubtless added to her difficulties in shaping his course towards the ministry. In the natural order of things he was to have been sent to the academy at Mile End, a hot-bed of Calvinism, then under the care of Dr Cawder.

“But,” he says, “being at that time an Arminian, I resolutely opposed it, especially upon finding that if I went thither, besides giving an experience, I must subscribe my assent to ten printed articles of the strictest Calvinistic faith, and repeat it every six months.”

It now looked as if the idea of the ministry was to be given up for good and all, and given up it probably would have been but for the intercession of Mr Kirkby, who strongly recommended that he should be placed under the care of the good and learned Dr Doddridge.

“Mr Kirby,” says Priestley, “had received a good education himself, was a good classical scholar, and had no opinion of the mode of education among the very orthodox Dissenters, and being fond of me, he was desirous of my having every advantage that could be procured for me. My good aunt, not being a bigoted Calvinist, entered into his views.”

Priestley had another ally in his step-mother, for his father had married again. She was a woman of good sense as well as of religion, and had been sometime housekeeper to Dr Doddridge, of whom she had a high opinion, and had always recommended his academy.

To Dr Doddridge, however, he was not destined to go. That eminent divine was in the last stages of the malady to which he eventually succumbed, and he died at Lisbon in the October of 1751.

CHAPTER II

Enters the Daventry Academy to be trained for the Ministry—Goes to Needham Market—His Life, Work and Privations there.

Accordingly, in 1752, he was sent to Daventry, then under the charge of Mr Ashworth. He was now nineteen. Although of a weakly constitution, his health was sufficiently re-established to enable him to stand the strain of preparation for the calling to which he now assiduously devoted himself. In mental equipments he was so much in advance of his fellows that he was excused all the studies of the first year and a great part of those of the second. He remained at the Academy three years.

No student ever dwelt more fondly on the memory of his Alma Mater than did Priestley on Daventry and all that it meant to him. Its atmosphere was wholly congenial to him, steadying, stimulating and strengthening the naturally vigorous powers of his mind. It was, he says, peculiarly favourable to the serious pursuit of truth, and every question of much importance, such as liberty and necessity, the sleep of the soul, and all the articles of theological orthodoxy and heresy were the subjects of continual discussion between the teachers and the taught. The general plan of studies was exceedingly favourable to free inquiry: the students were referred to authors on both sides of every question and were required to give an account of them, abridging the more important for future use.

Concerning this small seminary for the training of Dissenting ministers, the Rev. Mr Hargrove in his account of Priestley in the Inquirer of 1904, says:[4]—

“A miserable little place it must have seemed to the eyes of neighbouring clergy, with nothing in it of the venerable traditions, the ancestral wealth, the beauty and the dignity of the old colleges at Oxford and Cambridge. There was nothing grand about this building, nor did any sacred associations hallow its homeliness. But while the lamp of learning burnt low in the ancient universities during the eighteenth century, their gates kept fast closed against all who were too intelligent not to doubt the doctrines of the Established Church, or too honest to conceal their doubts, it burnt bright and clear, tiny though the flame might be, in obscure and poor haunts like this of Daventry. As Priestley proudly, and not untruly, boasted, at a later time, to the Prime Minister of England:

“‘Shutting the doors of the universities against us, and keeping the means of learning to yourselves, you may think to keep us in ignorance and so less capable to give you disturbance. But though ignominiously and unjustly excluded from the seats of learning, and driven to the expedient of providing at a great expense for scientific education among ourselves, we have had this advantage, that our institutions, being formed in a more enlightened age, are more liberal and therefore better calculated to answer the purpose of a truly liberal education. Thus while your universities resemble pools of stagnant water secured by dams and mounds, ours are like rivers which, taking their natural course, fertilise a whole country.’”

The manner in which he occupied his time, the range of his studies, and the miscellaneous nature of his reading at Daventry, may be seen from his following extract from his journal for 1755:—

BUSINESS DONE IN JANUARY, FEBRUARY AND MARCH

Practical

Howe’s Blessedness of the Righteous; Bennel’s Pastoral Care; Norris’s Letters and Some Sermons.

Controversial

Taylor on Atonement; Hampton’s Answer; Sherlock’s Discourse, vol. i.; Christianity not founded in Argument; Doddridge’s Answer; Warburton’s Divine Legation; Benson on the First Planting of Christianity; King’s Constitution of the Primitive Church.

Classics

Josephus, vol. i. from p. 39 to 770; Ovid’s Metamorphoses, to p. 139; Tacitus’s History, Life of Agricola, and Manners of the Germans.

Scriptures

John the Evangelist; The Acts of the Apostles; The Epistles to the Romans, Galatians, Ephesians; 1 and 2 Corinthians, in Greek; Isaiah to the 8th chapter, in Hebrew.

Mathematics

Maclaurin’s Algebra, to part ii.

Entertaining

Irene; Prince Arthur; Ecclesiastical Characters; Dryden’s Fables; Peruvian Tales; Voyage round the World; Oriental Tales; Massey’s Travels; Life of Hai Ebn Yokdam; History of Abdallah.

Composition

A Sermon on the Wisdom of God; An Oration on the Means of Virtue; 1st vol. of the Institutes of Natural and Revealed Religion.

With one of his classmates he engaged to rise early and so “dispatched many articles of business every day. One of them, which continued all the time we were at the academy, was to read every day ten folio pages in some Greek author, and generally a Greek play in the course of the week besides. By this means we became very well acquainted with that language and with the most valuable authors in it.... My attention was always more drawn to mathematical and philosophical studies than his was.”

Throughout the whole of his time at the academy, and despite the attractions which scholarship and literary studies had for him, and notwithstanding his eagerness to satisfy “the immense range of his curiosity in all things, physical, moral or social,” he never, he says, lost sight of the great object of his studies, which was the duties of a Christian minister.

“There it was that I laid the general plan which I have executed since. Particularly I there composed the first copy of my Institutes of Natural and Revealed Religion, Mr Clark, to whom I communicated my scheme, carefully perusing every section of it and talking over the subject of it with me.”

What three years of this mental, moral and intellectual discipline meant to the young Arminian may be summed up in his own words: he saw reason to embrace what he says is usually called the heterodox side of almost every question. And this notwithstanding that Dr Ashworth was earnestly desirous of making him as orthodox as possible.

“Notwithstanding the great freedom of our speculations and debates, the extreme of heresy among us was Arianism; and all of us, I believe, left the academy with a belief, more or less qualified, of the doctrine of atonement.”

Priestley, even at this early stage in his career, gave abundant proof of that resolute regard for truth which constituted the motive power of his life. His sturdy independence of thought, and his almost passionate resentment of dogmatic authority—among the most significant of his intellectual traits—were plainly manifested in his youth and early manhood. They continued to the end to be the dominant notes of his character and to be the springs of his action. They were at once the sources of his strength and the causes of his misfortunes.

Priestley had now finished with Daventry. He was twenty-two years of age, and ready, and indeed eager, to minister in all the glory of a full-bottomed wig to any congregation that might solicit his services.

The young divines at the academy were an unworldly set, taking but little thought of their future situations in life. They often, indeed, amused themselves, as Priestley tells us, with the idea of their dispersion in all parts of the kingdom, after living so happily together, and with the camaraderie of youth used to propose plans of meeting at certain times, and smile at the different appearances they would probably make after being ten or twenty years settled in the world.

Priestley set out on his career with the highest ideal of his calling; indeed to him the office of a Christian minister was the most honourable of any on earth, and he had no other ambition than to distinguish himself by his application to the studies proper to that profession. That he laboured unselfishly and with no idea of place and preferment is certain from the circumstance that he suffered from a physical disability which he must have recognised could not but tell strongly against his chance of worldly success. He had an inveterate stammer which, at times, made preaching as irksome to him as it was trying to those who had to listen to him. In spite of many and repeated attempts he never wholly overcame this trial. And yet nothing is more characteristic of him than, as he reviewed his career in the evening of his life, he should see that, like St Paul’s thorn in the flesh, his impediment had not been without its use.

“Without some such check as this,” he says, “I might have been disputatious in company, or might have been seduced by the love of popular applause as a preacher; whereas, my conversation and my delivery in the pulpit having nothing in them that was generally striking, I hope I have been more attentive to qualifications of a superior kind.”

The thorn in the flesh was probably not without its use in other ways. It probably drove him to literature. If he had none of the graces of pulpit oratory, he had at least the gift of facile composition. If he could not hope to move men’s minds by oral appeals, he might aspire to sway them by the power of the pen.

His first call came from an inconsiderable congregation at Needham Market in Suffolk. It was a poor and needy place, nominally under the charge of a superannuated minister, the prospects bounded by the possibilities attaching to a stipend of forty pounds a year. And these prospects, limited as they were, were still further curtailed by Priestley’s own action. He found that his congregation had been used to receive assistance from both Presbyterian and Independent funds. Priestley was no longer in the mood to receive assistance from the Independents, and told his congregation that he “did not choose to have anything to do” with that body. That little difference between the elders and himself concerning the sin of Adam and its consequence, together with his three years’ sojourn at Daventry, were beginning to bear fruit. The congregation readily consented to give up the Independent fund and promised to make good the deficiency themselves. Priestley, however, quickly realised that they deceived themselves either as to their ability or their willingness to redeem this promise, for the most, he says, he ever received from them was in the proportion of about thirty pounds per annum. They also deceived him in another sense. Their readiness in consenting to do without the assistance of the Independents disposed him to think “they could not have much bigotry among them.” Although he made it a rule to introduce nothing in the pulpit that could, or should, lead to controversy, he made no secret of his real opinions in conversation, or in his lectures on the theory of religion which he had composed at the academy and which he proceeded to give to all persons, without distinction of sex or age, who chose to come and listen to him. He then found that when he came to treat of the Unity of God merely as an article of religion his hearers were attentive to nothing but the soundness of his faith in the doctrine of the Trinity, and they quickly discovered, what he was at no pains to conceal, that he was a very pronounced Arian. From the time of this discovery, he says, his hearers fell off apace, especially as the old minister, as might have been expected, took a decided part against him. To add to his difficulties his aunt stopped his remittances. This was in part due to the ill offices of his orthodox, i.e., Independent, relations, but mainly because the worthy Mrs Keighley had largely exhausted her liberality in supporting others of her needy dependants, and in particular a deformed niece, her constant companion, and who could not, Priestley thinks, have subsisted without the greatest part, at least, of all she had to bequeath. He himself was the first to recognise that, being apparently settled in the world, he ought to be no longer burdensome to her. She had spared no expense in his education, and that, he says, was doing more for him than giving him an estate. Whatever the world might have thought as to his being settled in it, it had little to offer him beyond the dignity of his profession, and it is difficult to live on dignity alone. The respectable and agreeable families in the place, to whom he had flattered himself he would be useful, were not very prompt to support that dignity, and eventually it had to sustain itself on the wages of an agricultural labourer. Indeed, he says, had it not been for the good offices of Dr Benson and Dr Kippis, eminent eighteenth century divines, who procured him “now and then an extraordinary five pounds from different charities,” he believed he should have starved.[5]

“At Needham” he says, “I felt the effect of a low, despised situation, together with that arising from the want of popular talents. There were several vacancies in congregations in that neighbourhood where my sentiments would have been no objection to me, but I was never thought of. Even my next neighbour, whose sentiments were as free as my own, and known to be so, declined making exchanges with me, which, when I left that part of the country, he acknowledged was not owing to any dislike his people had to me as heretical, but for other reasons, the more genteel part of his hearers always absenting themselves when they heard I was to preach for him. But visiting that country some years afterwards, when I had raised myself to some degree of notice in the world, and being invited to preach in that very pulpit, the same people crowded to hear me, though my elocution was not much improved, and they professed to admire one of the same discourses they had formerly despised.”

The iron would have entered the soul of a weaker man, but Priestley, true to himself, never lost hope or faltered in his courage. However short his commons, Providence had endowed him with the continual feast of a contented mind. He firmly believed, even during the darkest hours of that Suffolk time, that this same wise Providence was disposing everything for the best. Notwithstanding his unfavourable circumstances, “I was,” he says, “far from being unhappy at Needham.” He boarded with a family for whose kindness he was always grateful. He had free access to one or two private libraries in the district, in particular one belonging to Mr Alexander, a Quaker.

“Here it was,” he says, “that I was first acquainted with any person of that persuasion; and I must acknowledge my obligation to many of them in every future stage of my life. I have met with the noblest instances of liberality of sentiment and the truest generosity among them.”

There can be little doubt, however, in spite of his robust optimism and the courage with which he confronted the world, the young divine led a cheerless and solitary existence at Needham. And it is no less certain that it was during this dark and troubled time that he sowed the seed—the wheat and the tares—which in the fulness of time was to furnish the harvest of good and evil he eventually garnered—fame, obloquy, insult, persecution, respect, affection and his position among the immortals.

Although the account which Priestley has left us of his life and work at Needham is somewhat meagre, it is sufficiently full to enable us to trace in it the initial stages of his evolution as a theological thinker. Indeed, he says his studies at this period were chiefly theological, theology being the business of his life and the vocation to which he had been called. He had left the academy with a qualified belief in the doctrine of atonement, and as he was desirous of getting some more definite ideas on the subject he set himself to peruse the whole of the Old and New Testament and to collect from them, with the greatest care, all the texts that appeared to him to have any relation to the subject, and to arrange them under a great variety of heads.

“The consequence of this was,” he says, “what I had no apprehension of when I began the work, viz., a full persuasion that the doctrine of atonement, even in its most qualified sense, had no countenance either from Scripture or reason.”

He then proceeded to digest his observations into a regular treatise, a part only of which was at that time published, under the title of the Doctrine of Remission. The portion omitted had reference to an examination of the writings of the Apostle Paul, whose reasoning, he was satisfied, was in many places far from being conclusive. This examination grew into a separate work, in which he tested every passage in which the reasoning appeared to him to be defective or the conclusions ill-supported; and, as he says, he thought them to be pretty numerous.

His friend Kippis advised him to publish this treatise under the character of an unbeliever, in order to draw the more attention to it.

“This” he says, “I did not choose, having always had a great aversion to assume any character that was not my own, even so much as disputing for the sake of discovering truth. I cannot ever say that I was quite reconciled to the idea of writing to a fictitious person, as in my Letters to a Philosophical Unbeliever, though nothing can be more innocent, or sometimes more proper, our Saviour’s parables implying a much greater departure from strict truth than those letters do. I therefore wrote the book with great freedom indeed, but as a Christian and an admirer of the Apostle Paul, as I always was in other respects.”

When nine sheets of the work were printed off, Dr Kippis dissuaded him from proceeding, or indeed from publishing anything of the kind, until he should be more known and his character better established, and accordingly he desisted. All that he considered of consequence in this work he subsequently inserted in the Theological Repository, “in order to its being submitted to the examination of learned Christians.”

Another task that he imposed on himself at Needham, and in part executed, was an accurate comparison of the Hebrew text of the Hagiographa and the Prophets with the version of the Septuagint, noting all the variations.

It was, perhaps, in connection with this inquiry that his name appears in the second list of subscribers to Taylor’s Hebrew Concordance, the second volume of which was published in 1757. The subscription was three guineas, a very considerable sum to the young divine in those days. The fact that he should have entered his name at all is an indication of the ardour and spirit of self-sacrifice with which he invariably pursued his inquiries, whether theological or scientific.

Priestley, to the end of his days, cared little for money except as the means of procuring the material for his investigations, and he was always ready to part with it, to the extent of his opportunity, in any cause in which his sympathies were enlisted.

His circumstances were now so straitened that, despite the great aversion which he conceived he had to the business of a schoolmaster—having often said that he would have recourse to anything else for a maintenance in preference to it—he was at length compelled to make some attempt that way. He therefore printed and distributed proposals to teach classics, mathematics, etc., for half a guinea a quarter, and to board the pupils in the house with himself for twelve guineas a year. It was recognised that he was not unqualified for this work, but although there was no obvious connection between Arianism and arithmetic it was enough that he was tainted with heresy, and not a pupil was entrusted to his care.

He then proposed to give lectures to grown persons on such branches of science as he could procure the means of illustrating, and began with a course of twelve lectures on the use of “A New and Correct Globe of the Earth.” His one course of ten hearers did little more than pay for his globes.

At this juncture a distant relative procured him an opportunity of preaching as a candidate at Sheffield, but his trial sermon was not approved: his manner was thought “too gay and airy.” One of the ministers at Sheffield had, however, more discrimination, and by his good offices he was recommended to a congregation at Nantwich, in Cheshire, who gave him an invitation to preach there for a year certain. Accordingly, he put together his few worldly possessions—his globes, his beloved books, his stock of sermons, and the manuscripts of the theological treatises he was too poor or too diffident to give to the world—and took the Ipswich packet to London as the least expensive way of getting down to Cheshire.

The chapel in which Priestley preached at Needham was taken down and rebuilt in 1837. When Rutt was preparing his edition of Priestley’s Memoirs, his daughter, Mrs Notcutt, who lived in Ipswich, made inquiries respecting Priestley, but with no result.

No reminiscences of him could be found at Needham. He was evidently thought too poor and too obscure for his memory to be treasured.

CHAPTER III

Goes to Nantwich—Starts a School—Is appointed a Tutor in the Warrington Academy—Life at Warrington.

Priestley left Needham Market in 1758. He had been there three years, and he was in his twenty-fifth year when he entered upon his work at Nantwich. Of this place he had always the happiest recollections. The meeting-house, as we learn from Partridge’s Historical Account of Nantwich, 1774, was a good, decent building, “to which appertains a convenient house for the minister.” Whether he actually occupied this house is uncertain. One account states that he boarded with Mr John Eddowes, a grocer, and sometimes showed his agility and sprightliness by leaping over the counter. Eddowes was described by Priestley as a very sociable and sensible man, and as he was fond of music his guest was—

“Induced to learn to play a little on the English flute, as the easiest instrument;” and, he continues, “though I was never a proficient in it, my playing contributed more or less to my amusement many years of my life.”

And he adds,—

“I would recommend the knowledge and practice of music to all studious persons; and it will be better for them if, like myself, they should have no very fine ear or exquisite taste, as by this means they will be more easily pleased and be less apt to be offended when the performances they hear are but indifferent.”

At Nantwich he found the people good-natured and friendly, and happily free from those controversies which had been the topics of almost every conversation in Suffolk. He had indeed little mind for them himself. His congregation never exceeded sixty persons, and a great proportion of them were travelling Scotchmen, men, he says, of very good sense, and, what he thought extraordinary, not one of them at all Calvinistical. As there were few children in the congregation there was little scope for exertion with respect to his duty in catechising.

As the duties of his office left him ample opportunity to turn the active powers of his mind to account, he again attempted to establish a school, and this time with a success far beyond his anticipations.

“My school,” he states, “consisted of about thirty boys, and I had a separate room for about half a dozen young ladies. Thus I was employed from seven in the morning until four in the afternoon, without any interval except one hour for dinner, and I never gave a holiday on any consideration, the red-letter days, as they are called, excepted. I had, therefore, but little leisure for reading or for improving myself in any way, except what necessarily arose from my employment.”

Priestley, in truth, was an excellent teacher, and with the success which his efforts brought him there passed away the last traces of the aversion with which he had entered on that calling. He made it his study to regulate his business as a schoolmaster in the best manner, and he was able to say with truth that in no school was more business done, or with more satisfaction, either to the master or the scholars, than in this school of his.

He was no longer haunted, as at Needham, with the fear of debt, and he was able to add to his stock of books and to gratify his wish to possess some philosophical instruments, such as a small air-pump and an electrical machine, which he taught his pupils to use and to keep in order, and by entertaining their parents and friends with experiments he added greatly to the reputation of his school. At that time, however, he had no leisure to make any original observations.

Such leisure as he had he gave to literature, recomposing his Observations on the Character and Reasoning of the Apostle Paul, which he began at Needham, and compiling an English grammar for the use of his school, on a new plan. This work, which was printed in 1761, had a considerable reputation in its day. David Hume acknowledged to Griffith, the bookseller, that he was made sensible of the Gallicisms and peculiarities of his style on reading it.

Priestley remained three years at Nantwich. His success there as a teacher induced the trustees of the newly-founded academy at Warrington to reconsider the desirability of engaging him as tutor in the Classical Languages and in what used to be called Polite Literature. His name had already been mentioned in connection with the Warrington Academy by his friend, Clark of Daventry, at the time of its establishment and whilst he was at Needham.

“But,” says Priestley, “Mr (afterwards Dr) Aikin, whose qualifications were superior to mine, was justly preferred to me.” On the death, on March 5, 1761, of Dr John Taylor of Norwich, the learned author of A Hebrew Concordance and other theological works, and a well-known classical scholar, the head of the academy and its tutor of divinity, Dr Aikin was appointed to succeed him, and Priestley was invited to take Dr Aikin’s place.

“This,” says Priestley, “I accepted, though my school promised to be more gainful to me. But my employment at Warrington would be more liberal and less painful. But, as I told the persons who brought me the invitation, I should have preferred the office of teaching the Mathematics and Natural Philosophy, for which I had at that time a great predilection.”

Priestley’s removal to Warrington, in September 1761, was one of the turning-points in his career, and no single circumstance in it exercised a greater influence on his life and fortunes. “The Warrington Academy for the education of young men of every religious denomination for the Christian ministry, or as laymen,” and the men who formed its tutors, played a notable part in the history of Nonconformity in England. In Taylor of Norwich; in Aikin, the father of the well-known physician and lecturer on Natural History, and of Anna Lætitia, better known as Mrs Barbauld, the poetess; in John Reinhold Forster, the naturalist, who accompanied Cook in his second voyage; in Nicholas Clayton, who succeeded Aikin as divinity tutor; in William Enfield, the author of the History of Liverpool and the well-known compiler of The Speaker, who afterwards became Rector Academicæ; in Pendlebury Houghton, and in Gilbert Wakefield, the accomplished editor of Lucretius, Priestley had for colleagues or successors as eminent a set of teachers as any place of learning at that time could boast of. It was at the Warrington Academy, the successor of the older academies belonging to the English Presbyterian body at Findern and Kendal, and the direct ancestor of the Manchester College at Oxford, that the free thought of English Presbyterianism first began to crystallise into the Unitarian theology, and for a time it was the centre of literary taste and activity, and of political liberalism of the district in which it was placed—the Areopagus in the Athens of Lancashire, as it was called.

The Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire (vol xi. p. I, 1858-59) contain “A Historical Sketch of Warrington Academy,” by Mr Henry A. Bright, compiled in great measure from a parcel of papers, letters and memoranda which had belonged to the Rev. J. Seddon, and which had been rescued from the hands of a Liverpool cheesemonger, who was using them for the ordinary purposes of his shop. Among these papers were letters of Priestley, Kippis, Aikin and others of lesser note, all of interest as throwing light on the history of the academy. I am indebted to Mr Bright’s paper for the following account of the character and fortunes of the academy. Mr John Seddon, we learn, was its virtual founder. The letters referred to, as well as the testimony of contemporaries, bear witness to “the concern which he had ever expressed for its support, honour, success; the indefatigable pains which he took for this purpose; the indifference which he showed to fame or censure, to good or evil report, so that he might serve the general designs of the institution.”

Seddon, although described as “a dullish person,” must have been a man of considerable pertinacity, patience and resource, as shown by the manner in which he steered his venture through the difficulties and dangers incident to its establishment, for he had to contend with the doubts, hesitation and luke-warmness of its professed supporters, and the “pleasing spirit of jealous rivalry” which existed between Liverpool and Manchester as to its locality. Liverpool advanced seven “excellent reasons” why the academy should not be settled at Warrington; of these one of the Manchester party writes:—“Some of them are false, others dubious, and all, whether true or not, trifling and impertinent.” This “retort courteous” was naturally followed by “Remarks on a letter from the gentlemen in Manchester to the gentlemen in Liverpool, subscribers to the intended Academy,” in which “the gentlemen in Liverpool” lose their temper most completely. Every fourth word in the remarks is italicised. “The gentlemen of Manchester,” are stigmatised as “the authors of contention and division,” and are subjected to much scathing sarcasm. Evidently the omens were not very propitious, but the wordy warfare eventually spent itself. Mr Seddon got his way; the trustees ultimately settled down to business and on June 30, 1757, the academy was duly inaugurated.

Its first home, immortalised by the lines in which Mrs Barbauld bids us

“Mark where its simple front yon mansion rears,

The nursery of men for future years,”

was described, in terms eminently suggestive of the incomparable Mr George Robins, as “a range of buildings” with “a considerable extent of garden ground, and a handsome terrace walk on the banks of the Mersey, possessing altogether a respectable collegiate appearance.” The “ugly, mean, old brick house,” no longer

“A dim old mansion, hidden half-away

From a dull world grown careless of its fame,”

has been transformed into a place of quiet, old-world dignity, and is now turned to uses worthy of its fame and in harmony with its traditions.

In spite of the seeming unanimity of the trustees, and the zeal and energy of their secretary, Mr Seddon, the fortunes of the Academy were ill-starred from the outset. Dr Taylor, one of the first Arians who ministered to the English Presbyterians, and an erudite and accomplished man—an author so widely read in his day that he is even mentioned by Burns in his Epistle to John Goudie:

“’Tis you and Taylor are the chief,

Wha are to blame for this mischief”—

was ill fitted to direct the precarious existence of the enterprise, and the old scholar must have sighed often for the free and independent position, and the dear home among an affectionate people, which he had sacrificed in leaving Norwich for Warrington. Dissensions arose, in the midst of which Dr Taylor died.

Dr Taylor, as already stated, was succeeded as theological tutor by Dr Aikin, who retained that position until his death in 1780.

“Dr Aikin,” says Gilbert Wakefield, “was a gentleman whose endowments as a man and as a scholar it is not easy to exaggerate by panegyric.... His intellectual attainments were of a very superior quality indeed. His acquaintance with all true evidences of revelation, with morals, politics and metaphysics, was most accurate and extensive. Every path of polite literature had been traversed by him, and traversed with success. He understood the Hebrew and French languages to perfection, and had an intimacy with the best authors of Greece and Rome superior to what I have ever known in any Dissenting minister from my own experience.”

Under his judicious guidance matters now went more smoothly: indeed, the eighteen or twenty years which followed constituted the golden age of the Academy, and the brightest and happiest of these were the six years of Priestley’s stay.

In the year following Taylor’s death the academy moved from the house by “Mersey’s gentle current,” then, we are told, an uncontaminated stream noted for its salmon, to the new Academy, which is described as a brick building in a quiet and secluded court, with stone copings and a clock and bell turret in the centre, of no great architectural beauty, but not unpleasing with its quaint, old-world look. This, too, was celebrated in verse by Mrs Barbauld:

“Lo! there the seat where science loved to dwell,

Where liberty her ardent spirit breathed.”

It exists no longer: municipal improvements have swept it away, and all that remains of Academy Place are the houses at right angles to it where dwelt Priestley and Enfield. As to emoluments, the tutors had each £100 a year from the subscription fund, and “with respect to dwelling houses, are to be at their own expenses.” Poor students were exempted from the payment of fees, but richer ones paid two guineas yearly to each of the tutors, who might take boarders into their houses at £15 per annum for those who had two months’ vacation, and £18 per annum for those who had no vacation, exclusive of “tea, washing, fire and candles.”

If the living at Warrington was plain and the thinking high, there was a degree of decorous gaiety, of refinement, of social charm, “easy, blithe and debonnair,” pervading the little community, which, as may be gleaned from the memoirs and reminiscences of the period, impressed and delighted everyone who was witness of it. Among those who had pleasant memories of the place were John Howard, the philanthropist, whose works on prison reform were printed by Eyres of Warrington under Dr Aikin’s superintendence;[6] William Roscoe, the author of the Lives of Lorenzo de Medici and Leo the Tenth, who first learned to care for botany from his visits to the Warrington Botanical Gardens, and whose first work, Mount Pleasant, was also printed there; Pennant, the naturalist, whose British Zoology and Tour in Scotland first saw the light at Warrington; Currie, the biographer of Burns, etc.

“The tutors in my time,” wrote Priestley—(“they knew better,” said Miss Lucy Aikin, “than to usurp the title of Professors”)—“lived in the most perfect harmony. We drank tea together every Saturday, and our conversation was equally instructive and pleasing. I often thought it not a little extraordinary that four persons who had no previous knowledge of each other should have been brought to unite in conducting such a scheme as this, and be all zealous Necessarians as we were. We were all, likewise, Arians; and the only subject of much consequence on which we differed respected the doctrine of atonement, concerning which Dr Aikin held some obscure notions. The only Socinian in the neighbourhood was Mr Seddon of Manchester, and we all wondered at him.”

Miss Lucy Aikin, the granddaughter of Priestley’s colleague, the niece of Mrs Barbauld, and the accomplished authoress of Memoirs of the Courts of Queen Elizabeth, and the biographer of Addison, has left us a little sketch of that society in which the early years of her girlhood were spent.

“I have often thought,” she says, “with envy of that society. Neither Oxford nor Cambridge could boast of brighter names in literature or science than several of those Dissenting tutors—humbly content, in an obscure town and on a scanty pittance, to cultivate in themselves, and communicate to a rising generation, those mental acquirements and moral habits which are their own exceeding great reward. They and theirs lived together like one large family, and in the facility of their intercourse they found large compensation for its deficiency in luxury and splendour.”

But we learn there were other attractions in the Warrington circle besides the tutors and their philosophy.

“We have a knot of lasses just after your own heart,” writes Mrs Barbauld (then Miss Aikin) to her friend Miss Belsham, “as merry, blithe and gay as you would wish them, and very smart and clever—two of them are the Miss Rigbys.”

We are further told the beautiful Miss Rigbys, whose father was “provider of the Commons,”

“made wild work with the students’ hearts; and the trustees had to insist that they must be removed from the house if any students stayed there. And so for a time they were, but Mrs Rigby’s health fortunately broke down, and the young ladies were brought back again.

“Rousseau’s Heloise, too, had much to answer for, and at its appearance (so Miss Aikin tells me), ‘everybody instantly fell in love with everybody’; and then it was that our poetess, after winning the hearts of half the students, some one or two of whom for her sake lived (I am informed) ‘sighing and single,’ was carried off to Palgrave by that queer little man whom henceforth she was to ‘honour and obey.’”

On another occasion she wrote:—

“Somebody was bold enough to talk of getting up private theatricals. This was a dreadful business! All the wise and grave, the whole tutorhood, cried out, ‘It must not be!’ The students, the Rigbys and, I must add, my aunt, took the prohibition very sulkily, and my aunt’s Ode to Wisdom was the result.”

Those wicked Miss Rigbys must have made the life of that “dullish person,” Mr Seddon, who acted as Rector Academiæ, and who was responsible for law and order, well-nigh insupportable. On one occasion—perhaps it was to celebrate their return—they asked some of the students to supper.

“Hams and trifles, and potted beef and other luxuries, were placed before them, and the students were asked to help the ladies. But the hams were made of wood, and the trifles were plates of soap-suds, and the potted beef was potted sawdust, and the other luxuries were equally tempting and equally tantalising.”

Nor were the Rector’s feelings likely to be soothed by such letters as the following from Mr Samuel Vaughan of Bristol, sent during the Long Vacation, complaining bitterly of the disappointment he felt as regards the Academy, and the “too great latitude allowed the students”:—

“My son Ben’s expenses during ten months’ absence amounted to £112, and Billy’s to £59, 12s.; this should nearly suffice for the University, and of itself would to many be a sufficient objection, but in my opinion the consequence of the expense is abundantly more pernicious, as it naturally leads to Levity, a love of pleasure, dissipation and affectation of smartness; diverts the attention, and prevents the necessary application to serious thoughts and Study. When I sent my Sons so great a distance, it was with a view to preserve them from the reigning contagion of a dissipated age, to imbibe good Morals, acquire knowledge, and to obtain a manly and solid way of thinking and acting, but they are returned with high Ideas of modern refinements, of dress and external accomplishments, which if ever necessary, yet resumed by them much too soon. As one instance, they think it a Sight to appear without having their hair Frissened, and this must be done by a dresser, even upon the Sabbath. No person can more wish for, and encourage an open and Liberal way of thinking and acting than myself, yet do I think that day should be kept with Ancient Solemnity, for to say the least, the reverse gives offence to many serious good People, and exhibits an Ill example at a time when Religion is at so low an ebb as to stand in need of every tie and prop (whether real or imaginary) for its support, therefore any relaxation or Innovation under sanction of such a seminary as yours may have the most pernicious tendency, for when restraints even in unessentials are removed they are frequently a clue or gradation to the fashionable levity of the Age and Irreligion.”

That the mauvais quart d’heure under the ancestral roof was not without its chastening influence on the improvident Ben is evident from the fact that the same post brought the perturbed Rector a letter from him protesting that—

“none of us have been vicious but only gay.... Our recreations have been innocent though expensive, but they imagine that they cannot be expensive without being criminal.”

However, he expresses contrition and promises amendment, fears that he has encroached on Mr Seddon’s goodness and forbearance, and that his conduct may have acted injuriously on the Academy, etc., etc., and winds up by saying that Mr Wilkes will probably get a pardon from the Crown, and that he (Mr Vaughan) does not believe that he ever wrote the North Briton—No. 45.

Alas! Mr Benjamin Vaughan’s contrition was very short-lived, for next year that “affectionate but distressed pupil” had to confess to the Rector that he dare not show his accounts to his father.

“My father, last year, was extremely angry at an account I gave him of £112 spent at Warrington—the present sum is £179. Bill disclaims all share in the expenses above £60. I then have £119 to answer for; I who promised such a strict amendment, and who had as many excuses last year as at present. I had more journeys, more music, and yet, according to his knowledge, have spent £7 more in my present year of pennance, repentance, etc.!”

And yet Mr Benjamin Vaughan became a useful member of society, had a seat in the House of Commons, and had the honour of having dedicated to him the Lectures on History and General Policy, to which is prefixed an “Essay on a Course of Liberal Education for Civil and Active Life,” to which he had listened as a pupil and which Priestley published in 1788.

Whatever may have been Mr Seddon’s worries he had at least the consolation of a loving wife, although, it is to be feared, she too suffered much at the hands of those terrible Miss Rigbys, and even from Miss Aikin, who was somewhat of a quiz. The daughter of an equerry to Frederick Prince of Wales, she was a very fine lady, and, says Mr Bright, “spelt abominably.”

“Among the Seddon papers is a letter which her husband wrote to her during a short absence in 1766. On the back of his letter Mrs Seddon prepares a rough draft of an answer to her truant husband. The word which puzzles her most is ‘adieu,’ and she has to spell it over three times before she can determine whether the ‘e’ comes before the ‘i,’ or the ‘i’ before the ‘e.’ The knotty point is at last settled and the fair copy written out; and this, too, her careful husband put away and preserved among his papers.”

I cannot resist quoting the last paragraph of this most charming but laborious letter.

“Let me hear of you as often as you can; for it does me more good, and has a much stronger affect upon my spirits than either eather or salvolatiley. Adieu, my dear, except the sincerest and best wishes for your health and happiness, of one whose greatest pleasure in this world is in subscribing herself your truely affectionate wife.—J. Seddon.

“P.S.—I shall want cash before you return; what must I doe? Pray put me in a way how to replenish. Remember me propperly to everybody.”

We cannot, however, concern ourselves at greater length with the life at the Warrington Academy, or dwell much longer on the fortunes of that seat of learning. To do full justice to the theme would need indeed the witty pen which in “Cranford” delineated the social life of a neighbouring town with such inimitable grace and charm.

The worthy Mr Seddon died in 1770, and was succeeded as Rector by Dr Enfield, a man distinguished for elegance of taste and sound literary judgment, and who, on the death, ten years later, of Dr Aikin, became chief tutor. For various reasons, which it is unnecessary to state here, the trustees eventually decided to remove the Academy to Manchester, and Warrington knew it no more after 1786.

During the twenty-nine years of its existence in the latter place some 400 pupils had passed through it—many of them noteworthy men in their day, such as Percival; the Aikins; Rigby of Norwich; Estlin of Bristol; Sergeant Heywood; Hamilton Rowan, the Irish rebel; Malthus, the political economist; Lord Ennismore; Sir James Carnegie of Southesk; Mr Henry Beaton, Mr Pendlebury Houghton and Dr Crompton.

“In looking over the students’ names,” says Mr Bright, “I cannot but notice how many of their descendants are still the staunch supporters of the liberal dissent which was the distinguishing characteristic of the Academy. Some families, like the Willoughbys of Parkham, whose last lord was educated at Warrington, have now died out; others, like the Aldersons of Norwich, of which family the late judge was a member, have seceded to the Church of England. But we still find united the lineal and the theological successors of the Academy’s students in the Rigbys, the Martineaus, and the Taylors of Norwich, the Heywoods and the Yateses of Liverpool, the Potters of Manchester, the Gaskells of Wakefield, the Brights of Bristol, the Shores of Sheffield, the Hibberts of Hyde, and the Wedgwoods of Etruria.”

CHAPTER IV

Priestley marries—Is ordained—His Essay on Education—Lectures on History and General Policy—His Chart of Biography—Becomes a Doctor of Laws of the University of Edinburgh—His visits to London—Makes the acquaintance of Dr Price, Canton and Benjamin Franklin—Writes the History of Electricity—Is elected into the Royal Society.

Priestley’s entrance into the Warrington community affected his career in more ways than one. In the first place, the improvements in his worldly prospects enabled him to marry; and in the second he was led to turn his attention to Natural Philosophy, to which, as we have seen, he was already predisposed. The selection of his wife and of his studies influenced the subsequent course of his life profoundly. Why he should have left the sprightly, witty “Nancy Aikin, with the blue and laughing eyes,” to be “carried off to Palgrave by that queer little man” whom she had to “honour and obey” as a school-mistress, is one of those inscrutable dispensations which the hymeneal god delights in. That they were the best of friends and had pleasure in each other’s society is abundantly evident. Priestley warmly admired her genius: she confessed, indeed, that he first encouraged her to try her ’prentice hand at poetry. She was about eighteen when Priestley first appeared at Warrington, and about ten years his junior, a girl of many personal attractions and, as demonstrated by her writings, of great mental ability and accomplishments. She had been carefully educated by her father, had a considerable knowledge of modern literature, and was fairly well-read in that of Greece and Rome. Her first volume of poems was printed at Warrington in 1773 and ran through four editions in a year. It was said of her that she roused the admiration of Fox and Johnson, the envy of Rogers and Wordsworth, and the jealousy of Goldsmith; Scott declared she made a poet of him; Brougham eulogised her in the House of Lords, and Mrs Oliphant has paid her a beautiful tribute in her Literary History of England.

Miss Lucy Aikin, in her edition of her aunt’s collected works, gives a charming description of her as she appeared in early womanhood:—

“She was at this time possessed of great beauty, distinct traces of which she retained to the latest period of her life. Her person was slender, her complexion exquisitely fair, with the bloom of perfect health; her features were regular and elegant, and her dark blue eyes beamed with the light of wit and fancy.”

Not less charming is the testimony of Henry Crabb Robinson, who, in 1805, wrote:—

“Mrs Barbauld bore the remains of great personal beauty.[7] She had a brilliant complexion, light hair, blue eyes, a small, elegant figure, and her manners were very agreeable, with something of the generation then departing.... Mrs Barbauld is so well known by her prose writings that it is needless for me to attempt to characterise her here. Her excellence lay in the soundness and acuteness of her understanding, and in the perfection of her taste. In the estimation of Wordsworth she was the first of our literary women, and he was not bribed to this judgment by any especial congeniality of feeling or by concurrence in speculative opinions. I may here relate an anecdote connecting her and Wordsworth, though out of its proper time by many, many years; but it is so good that it ought to be preserved from oblivion. It was after her death that Lucy Aikin published Mrs Barbauld’s collected works, of which I gave a copy to Miss Wordsworth. Among the poems is a Stanza on Life, written in extreme old age. It had delighted my sister, to whom I had repeated it on her deathbed. It was long after I gave these works to Miss Wordsworth that her brother said, ‘Repeat me that Stanza by Mrs Barbauld.’ I did so. He made me repeat it again. And so he learned it by heart. He was at the time walking in his sitting-room at Rydal with his hands behind him, and I heard him mutter to himself, ‘I am not in the habit of grudging people their good things, but I wish I had written those lines.’”[8]

Priestley’s choice fell upon Mary Wilkinson, who was of about the same age as Anna Letitia Aikin. She was the daughter of a well-to-do ironmaster at Wrexham, with whose family he had become acquainted in consequence of the youngest son, William, having been a pupil at his school in Nantwich. He certainly had no reason to regret his choice, whatever Mary Wilkinson might have felt at times in the “cloudy weather” she was destined to go through. It is, of course, idle to speculate “on what might have been if things had been otherwise.” The world, at all events, was the richer for the Hymns in Prose and the Early Lessons, on which Mr Rochemont Barbauld’s young charges and many succeeding generations of children were nurtured.

From a worldly point of view Priestley’s marriage was not without its advantages to him, immediate and prospective. Mary Wilkinson had all the force of character, and much of the mental and intellectual ability of her father and her brother John, both of whom had a considerable share in the development of the iron industry in this country. Of them Miss Meteyard, in her Life of Wedgwood, writes:—

“John Wilkinson and his father Isaac played no unimportant part in the vast industrial movement of their time. Isaac invented and first brought into action the steam-engine blast at his iron works near Wrexham. John, at the same place, as also at Bradley Forge, in Staffordshire, executed all the ponderous castings for the steam engines required in the Cornish mines, as well as those for Boulton and Watt when they first commenced business.”

The father was ruined in one of the commercial crises of which the times were fertile. Of the son we shall hear more as this history proceeds. He was one of the truest and staunchest of the many true and staunch friends Priestley possessed.[9]

Priestley was married in 1762, Mr Threlkeld, one of the students at the academy, who subsequently became a well-known Presbyterian divine, notable for his linguistic attainments and his extraordinary power of memory, being his groomsman. Whatever might be Mr Threlkeld’s faculty of recollection it went wholly astray on this occasion, for he became so absorbed in the study of a Welsh Bible he found beside him in the pew that he became quite oblivious to the onerous duties of his office.

Of his marriage Priestley characteristically writes:—

“This proved a very suitable and happy connection, my wife being a woman of an excellent understanding, much improved by reading, of great fortitude and strength of mind, and of a temper in the highest degree affectionate and generous; feeling strongly for others, and little for herself. Also, greatly excelling in everything relating to household affairs, she entirely relieved me of all concern of that kind, which allowed me to give all my time to the prosecution of my studies and the other duties of my station.”

All accounts we have of Mary Wilkinson are to the same effect. Her great-granddaughter, Madame Belloc, writes:—

“It is a tradition in the family that Mrs Priestley once sent her famous husband to market with a large basket, and that he so acquitted himself that she never sent him again! Mrs Priestley was extremely intelligent and original. Lord Shelburne once found her sitting on the top of a pair of steps, clad in a great apron, and vigorously pasting on a new wallpaper. She received him with calm composure. There is a good portrait of her as an elderly lady in a cap, curving her hand round her ear to assist her hearing. She must have herself insisted upon being painted in this unusual attitude. She looks like a person of excellent understanding, whose mind has been much improved by reading.”

Before he committed himself to matrimony Priestley took another step hardly less momentous.

What it was may be gleaned from the following extract of a letter dated May 1, 1762, to Seddon, who was away at the time on one of his frequent begging expeditions on behalf of the Academy:—

“I am seriously preparing for ordination. As all things in this world are uncertain, I think it a point of prudence not to omit anything that may possibly be of advantage to me, if ever it be my lot to be obliged to have recourse to the ministry for the whole or any part of my subsistence, particularly as I am going to have a dearer and more important stake in this world than I have ever yet had in it. I can sincerely say I never knew what it was to be anxious on my own account, but I cannot help confessing I begin to feel a good deal on the account of another person. The hazard of bringing a person into difficulties which she cannot possibly have any idea or prospect of affects me, at times, very sensibly.”

The earliest known portrait of Priestley is of this period. It represents him as a slender young man with sloping shoulders, with a keen, intelligent eye and an expression not unlike that caught by Fuseli at a later time; his long neck is swathed in the ample folds of a white neck-cloth, and he wears a full-bottomed wig.[10] During Priestley’s residence at Warrington an artist was employed in making silhouettes of the principal inhabitants. Many of these were published by Dr Kendrick in his Profiles of Warrington Worthies. In that of Priestley the features are delicate and almost feminine: the full-bottomed wig is very much in evidence.

Priestley brought his young bride to “the good dwelling-house neatly filled up, handsomely sashed to the front, with a flight of five steps to the entrance, three storeys high, four rooms on a floor, cellared under, with convenient kitchens, yards and out-offices,” over which she was to preside for the next five years. To add to her responsibilities she was promptly charged with the care of the gay but improvident Mr Ben Vaughan and his brother Bill, and “received the very moderate compensation of fifty pounds a year for each son.”

Priestley’s house in Academy Street still remains, and the fact that he occupied it until his removal in 1767 is commemorated by a bronze tablet affixed to its walls by the members of the Warrington Society on the hundredth anniversary of his death.

There is a local tradition that an adjoining building was used by him as a laboratory, although it is difficult to find any grounds for the belief. There is no mention of experimental work at this time in his memoirs or correspondence, and whatever he might have done in this direction for his own amusement or the instruction of his pupils needed no special apartment.[11]

Lectures on chemistry were, however, given at the academy by Matthew Turner, who is believed to have first turned Priestley’s attention to that science. Turner, who practised medicine in Liverpool, although an eccentric man, applied his knowledge of chemistry to industrial purposes, and he is credited with having revived the art of glass-painting.

Priestley was now wholly engrossed in the business of teaching, and although nominally tutor in the classical languages and in the belles lettres, there was practically no department of education in which at one time or other during the half-dozen years of his sojourn at Warrington he was not called upon, or did not offer, to instruct. He enlarged and published the Grammar to which reference has already been made, and began a treatise on “The Structure and Contemporary State of the English Language,” the material for which he eventually gave to Croft of Oxford for the compilation of his Grammar and Dictionary.

But what particularly impressed him as a practical educationist was that whilst most of his pupils were designed for situations in civil and active life, every article in the plan of their education was adapted to the learned professions. There was hardly any medium between an education for the counting-house, consisting of writing, arithmetic and merchants’ accounts, and a method of instruction in the abstract sciences. He proceeds to trace how this came about:—

“Formerly none but the clergy were thought to have any occasion for learning. It was natural, therefore, that the whole plan of education, from the Grammar School to the finishing at the University, should be calculated for their use. If a few other persons, who were not designed for Holy Orders, offered themselves for education, it could not be expected that a course of studies should be provided for them only. And, indeed, as all those persons who superintended the business of education were of the clerical order, and had themselves been taught nothing but the rhetoric, logic and school-divinity, or civil law, which comprised the whole compass of human learning for several centuries, it could not be expected that they should entertain larger, or more liberal, views of education; and still less that they should strike out a course of study for the use of men who were universally thought to have no need of study, and of whom few were so sensible of their own wants as to desire any such advantages.

“Besides, in those days, the great ends of human society seem to have been but little understood. Men of the greatest rank, fortune and influence, and who took the lead in all the affairs of State, had no idea of the great objects of wise and extensive policy, and therefore could never apprehend that any fund of knowledge was requisite for the most eminent stations in the community. Few persons imagined what were the true sources of wealth, power and happiness in a nation. Commerce was little understood, or even attended to; and so slight was the connection of the different nations of Europe that general politics were very contracted. And thus, men’s views being narrow, little previous furniture of mind was requisite to conduct them.”

These paragraphs constitute the introduction to an Essay on Education which Priestley published in 1764, with the object of drawing attention to the necessity for a reform in our educational system. Although written nearly a century and a half ago, Priestley’s main contention that the education of youth should be directed and adapted to the circumstances and needs of the time in which they live is just as valid now as then, and needs the same insistence. He points out that “the severe and proper discipline” of the Grammar Schools, which are subservient to the Universities, is become a “topic of ridicule.”

“This is certainly a call upon us to examine the state of education in this country, and to consider how those years are employed which men pass previous to their entering into the world; for upon this their future behaviour and success must, in a great measure, depend. A transition, which is not easy, can never be made with advantage; and therefore it is certainly our wisdom to contrive that the studies of youth should tend to fit them for the business of manhood; and that the objects of their attention, and turn of thinking in younger life, should not be too remote from the destined employment of their riper years. If this be not attended to they must necessarily be mere novices upon entering the great world, be almost unavoidably embarrassed in their conduct, and, after all the time and experience bestowed upon their education, be indebted to a series of blunders for the most useful knowledge they will ever acquire.”

“That man is a friend of his country who observes and endeavours to supply any defects in the methods of educating youth.”

At the risk of being called “a projector, a visionary, or whatever anybody pleases,” he proceeds to show “how to fill up with advantage those years which immediately precede a young gentleman’s engaging in those higher spheres of active life in which he is destined to move.”

It will be observed that Priestley is not dealing with any scheme of national or universal education adapted to every youth in the community. He is concerned only with the young man who is destined for a station in which his conduct may considerably affect the liberty and the property of his countrymen, and the riches, the strength and the security of his country; and who is within the influence of an honourable ambition to appear as a legislator in the State, or of standing near the helm of affairs and guiding the secret springs of Government—in a word, that class which the universities thought they alone were specially concerned with.

“That the parents and friends of young gentlemen destined to act in any of these important spheres may not think a liberal education unnecessary to them, and that the young gentlemen themselves may enter with spirit into the enlarged views of their friends and tutors, I would humbly propose some new articles of academical instruction, such as have a nearer and more evident connection with the business of active life, and which may therefore bid fairer to engage the attention and rouse the thinking powers of young gentlemen of an active genius. The subjects I would recommend are ‘Civil History,’ and more especially the important objects of ‘Civil Policy’; such as the theory of laws, government, manufactures, commerce, naval force, etc., with whatever may be demonstrated from history to have contributed to the flourishing state of nations, to rendering a people happy and populous at home and formidable abroad; together with those articles of previous information, without which it is impossible to understand the nature, connections and mutual influences of those great objects.”

He then gives plans and detailed syllabuses of three distinct courses of lectures subservient to this design. The first is on the “Study of History in General”; the second on the “History of England,” and the third on the “Present Constitution and Laws of England.” This scheme is so daring an innovation on the established order of things 150 years ago, that Priestley then proceeds with care to anticipate, examine and rebut the objections which may be urged against it. There is no necessity to dwell upon them now. Much water has flowed under the Folly Bridge or past the “Backs” since Priestley’s essay was penned, and everything for which he contended, and even more, now finds its proper place in the educational schemes of all our universities, ancient and modern. But it is significant of the condition of things in the older seats of learning in the middle of the eighteenth century, that he should have to urge his project apologetically and to labour points which to-day appear almost axiomatic. The essay is characteristic of the author in the breadth and liberality of its tone, in its declaration of the real functions and objects of government, and in its note of true patriotism. Of course it was fiercely attacked, among others, by Griffiths in the Monthly Review, but it enlisted Josiah Wedgwood’s sympathy with its author and formed the basis of a friendship as cordial and enduring as it was useful.

The lectures on “History” and on “General Policy” were subsequently published, with a dedication, as already stated, to Mr Benjamin Vaughan. It is interesting at this juncture to learn the views Priestley inculcated on the youth of Warrington concerning other matters which, like the education problem and the poor, are always with us.

In the 51st lecture on “General Policy” we read:—

“The gain of the merchants, it is said, is not always the gain of the country in general. If, for instance, a merchant imports foreign goods by which the consumption of national manufactures is hurt, though the merchant should be gainer by those goods, the State is a loser. As, on the other hand, a merchant may export the manufactures of his own country to his own loss and the nation’s gain. But if the merchants be gainers, the consumers, that is those for whose use manufactures are established, having a power of purchasing or not at pleasure, must be so too. And if, after sufficient trial, it be found that merchants importing foreign goods can sell these cheaper than the manufactures can be bought at home, it is an indication that it is not for the interest of the nation at large to encourage such manufactures.

“Though exportation makes a nation rich, we are not to judge of the quantity of riches which a nation gains by trade from exportation only, but the importation must also be considered. If these exactly balance one another nothing can be said to be gained or lost, just as a person is not the richer for selling a quantity of goods if he buy to the same amount. Nay, though the exportation be lessened, if the importation be lessened more than in proportion, it proves an increase of gainful trade, notwithstanding the decrease of exportation. This, however, is estimating the value of commerce by the mere increase of money. But a nation may flourish by internal commerce only, and what is external commerce between two nations not united in government would be internal if they should come under the same government. In every fair bargain the buyer and the seller are equally gainers, whether money be accumulated by either of the parties or not.

“It is a great mistake to confound the king’s revenue with the gain a nation makes by its trade. No man would presume to say it is more for the public benefit that the nation should expend a million or more every year with foreigners, in order to raise a hundred thousand pounds to the revenue by the customs, than to save that million or more within ourselves and to raise only the hundred thousand pounds the other way. But Ministers of State are apt to estimate the value of everything to the country by the gain it brings, and that immediately to themselves....

“The legislature of any country has seldom interfered in the affairs of commerce, but commerce has suffered in consequence to it, owing to the ignorance of statesmen, and even of merchants themselves, concerning the nature of trade. And indeed the principles of commerce are very complicated and require long experience and deep reflection before they can be well understood....

“Most politicians have injured commerce by restricting, confining or burthening it too much; the consequence of which has been that by aiming at great immediate advantage they have cut off the very springs of all future advantage. The inconveniences which have arisen to a nation from leaving trade quite open are few, and very problematical in comparison of the manifest injury it receives from being cramped in almost any form whatsoever....

“Mr Colbert, a man of great probity, knowledge and industry ... would have done better to have listened to the advice of an old merchant, who being consulted by him about what he should do in favour of trade, said, ‘Laissez nous faire.’”

In another place he says:—

“The happiness of all nations, therefore, as one great community, will be best promoted by laying aside all national jealousy of trade, and by each country cultivating those productions or manufactures which they can do to the most advantage; and experience, in a state of perfect liberty, will soon teach them what those are. In this state of things the only advantage will be on the side of industry and ingenuity, and no man or nation ought to wish it to be anywhere else.”

With regard to questions of political and civil liberty, the theory of the progress of law, the influence of religion on civil society, the connection of modes of religion with forms of government, the teaching is precisely what we should expect in such a hot-bed of liberal dissent as the Warrington Academy. With regard to the connection between civil government and religion he says:—

“The principal sufferer by this alliance between the Church and the State is religion itself, that is, the members of society as professors of religion and deriving advantages from it. For when it is thus guarded by the State, if it be faulty or wants reformation, it must long continue so. The professors of it, being interested in its support, will do everything in their power to prevent any alteration, though it should be ever so much wanted....

“It is alleged, in favour of these establishments, that religion has an influence on the conduct of men in this life. No doubt it has, as it connects the hopes of a future life with good behaviour in this. But this is done in all sects of Christians, and as much in those which are reprobated by the State as those which are encouraged by it. Besides, if this was the true cause of attachment to Christian establishments, the friends of them would be much more jealous of unbelievers than they are of sectaries, which does not appear to be the case.... One would think that Christian Governments might content themselves with establishing the Christian religion in general without confining themselves to any particular mode of it. But so far is this from being the case, that by the present laws of this country a man who denies the doctrine of the Trinity, which has no more imaginable connection with the good of the State than the doctrine of Transubstantiation, is deemed a blasphemer and sentenced to suffer confiscation of goods and imprisonment....

“In all other countries the established religion is that of the majority of the people, and the writers in defence of it vindicate it on this principle, viz., that it is the religion of the majority, whatever that be. But in Ireland we have a most remarkable exception to this rule. There the established religion is not that of the majority but of a small minority of the people, perhaps not more than that of one in ten of the inhabitants. That so flagrant an abuse of power should exist, and under a Government pretending to justice, and even to liberality, is barely credible.”

Here again much water has flowed under the bridges since these words were penned, but the bread which Priestley cast upon the stream, as well as that upon which he nurtured the young gentlemen of the Warrington Academy, has, we recognise, not been wholly wasted. In regard to what he considered other anomalies, the State still takes upon itself a “great, dangerous and unnecessary burthen” by undertaking the care of religion. From the remains of superstition the clergy are still considered as a distinct order of men in this country, and they are in a manner represented in Parliament by the bishops having seats in the House of Lords. “From which,” he says, “if they had a just sense of the nature of their office, and consulted their true dignity, they would retire of their own accord. At present their seat in the House only flatters their pride and gives the minister so many votes.”

In regard to other items of political and social development, it is noteworthy that Priestley was a consistent opponent of national education as we understand it to-day, on the ground that in his judgment it was inimical to liberty and the natural rights of parents. His position, in fact, was very similar to that taken up by a considerable and influential section of Liberal Dissenters prior to 1870.

Whilst at Warrington he also gave lectures on the “Theory of Language,” on the “Laws and Constitutions of England,” and on “Oratory and Criticism”—all of which were subsequently published, and which may still be read with profit, despite Lord Brougham’s sneering allusion to the adventurous tutor afflicted with an incurable stutter who, having never heard any speaking save in the pulpits of meeting-houses, promulgated rules of eloquence and of jurisprudence to the senators and lawyers of his country. The adventurous tutor with the incurable stutter even taught Elocution, also Logic and Hebrew for a time, and one year he gave a course of lectures on Anatomy.

Whilst at Warrington he published a Chart of Biography, exhibiting by lines and spaces the succession of the eminent men in every age and of every profession, with the relative length of their lives, and in such manner that at any given epoch it could be seen not only who flourished in it, but how all their ages stood with respect to one another, who were a man’s contemporaries, how far any of them was before him, or how far after him, in the order of their births or deaths.

The Chart of Biography procured for its compiler the degree of Doctor of Laws of the University of Edinburgh.

It has been said of Priestley that he was not a man who made friends. If it is meant by this that he was essentially a self-centred recluse, who sought his relaxation in change of occupation, or only within his own family circle, the statement gives a wholly imperfect idea of the man and is very wide of the truth.

In reality he was one of the most gregarious and most easily approachable of individuals, a man of strong, active human sympathies and of much social charm. There is abundant evidence of this in the testimony of his contemporaries; it is illustrated by numberless anecdotes, and is reflected in almost every letter of his correspondence.

It was, doubtless, under the impulse of the social instincts of his nature that, whilst at Warrington, he was led to begin the practice of spending one month in every year in London. This, remarks his son, was of great use to him. He saw and heard a great deal. A new turn was frequently given to his ideas. New and useful acquaintances were formed, and old ones confirmed. London then, as now, was the centre of the intellectual life of the kingdom and the Royal Society the seat of its scientific activity. To a man of Priestley’s versatility and eagerness, whose curiosity ranged practically over every department of human knowledge, these annual visits were a sort of intellectual tonic and gave a powerful stimulus to his activity.

On the first of them he made the acquaintance of men who, in their several capacities, proved to be true and valuable friends, notably, Dr Richard Price, Mr Canton, and Dr Benjamin Franklin.

Dr Price, a philosopher, and an eminent nonconformist divine, and one of the leading Arians of his time, is best known by his work on morals, and by his writings on financial and political questions. Among these, his papers in the Philosophical Transactions on “Life Insurance” and on the “Proper Method of Calculating the Values of Contingent Reversions,” are specially noteworthy. His pamphlet on the National Debt is said to have influenced Pitt in establishing the Sinking Fund for its extinction, and that on the “Policy of the War with America” to have contributed to the declaration of independence by the Americans. His liberal opinions gained him the friendship and patronage of Lord Shelburne. The acquaintance with Priestley soon ripened into a lasting friendship, which was in nowise disturbed by the controversy on materialism and necessity in which they subsequently engaged. Price and Priestley held similar views as to the French Revolution, and both were denounced with equal fierceness by Burke. Price died in the spring of 1791, and his funeral sermon was preached by Priestley, who succeeded him in the care of the Gravel Pit Meeting at Hackney. He was a man for whom Priestley ever entertained the warmest feelings of friendship on the ground of his amiable simplicity, his truly Christian spirit, disinterested patriotism and true candour.

John Canton, a notable schoolmaster in his day, is best known for his electrical inquiries and for his work on the compressibility of water, and his name is associated with the phosphorescent substance first obtained by him by calcining oyster shells with flowers of sulphur.

Among the Canton papers in the possession of the Royal Society is a letter from Seddon to Canton introducing Priestley, in which the latter is described as the author of A Chart of Biography and of an Essay on Education, and in which the writer says of the bearer:—

“You will find him a benevolent, sensible man, with a considerable share of learning. Besides the studies which belong to his profession, he has a taste for Natural Philosophy which will not render him less agreeable to you.”

That Priestley greatly enjoyed and profited by his Christmas in London is evident from the terms in which he refers to it in a letter to Canton under date February 14, 1766.

“The time I had the happiness to spend in your company appears upon revision like a pleasing dream. I frequently enjoy it once again in recollection, and ardently wish for a repetition of it. I wish, but in vain, that it may ever be in my power to return in kind your generous communication of philosophical intelligence and discoveries.”

He concludes the letter by expressing a desire to become a Fellow of the Royal Society.

Benjamin Franklin, journeyman printer and journalist, statesman and diplomatist, was about sixty years old when Priestley, then a man of little more than half his age, first made his personal acquaintance. The Royal Society, which had formerly ridiculed the discoveries which have given Franklin his undisputed position as one of the most eminent natural philosophers of his time, had paid him, although still a British subject, the distinguished compliment of making him an honorary fellow. At the time of Priestley’s coming to town he was occupied with the great struggle on behalf of the American Colony which ended in the defeat of the Stamp Act, and his famous examination before a Committee of Parliament had made him an object of great popular interest. During the eight or nine succeeding years in which Franklin remained in England his acquaintance with Priestley grew into the closest friendship, and there can be no question that the friendship reacted powerfully on Priestley’s work as a political thinker and as a natural philosopher. Indeed, it may be truthfully said that Franklin made Priestley into a man of science.

As the result of this intercourse with Canton and Franklin, Priestley offered to compile what he called “a distinct and methodical account” of the history of discoveries in electricity, provided he could be supplied with the necessary books. Franklin warmly seconded the proposal, and undertook, with the assistance of friends, to furnish all existing literature on the subject. As a matter of fact almost the whole of the historical account in Priestley’s book is taken from the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, which was then the chief source of information concerning electrical science, inasmuch as the English electricians of that period, in addition to their own original papers, which were both numerous and important, introduced into the Transactions detailed accounts of all the principal books on electricity published abroad. In putting together his work, Priestley, having, as he says, a pretty good machine, was led to endeavour to ascertain several facts which were in dispute, and was thus led by degrees into a large field of experimental inquiry, in which he spared no expense that he could possibly afford. One of the most important of his discoveries is that charcoal is a good conductor. He describes coloured circles produced by receiving discharges from 21 square feet of glass on metal plates. When an electrical battery is discharged light bodies placed near the electric circuit are moved. Priestley ascribes this motion to what he calls the force of the lateral explosion, and he conceives it to depend upon the sudden elasticity given to the air. He found that a long circuit conducts much worse than a short circuit, even when the conductors are the same; also, that when the circuit contains an imperfect conductor a spark passes to bodies near, no electricity being communicated.

The work necessitated much correspondence with Franklin and others of his philosophical friends in London, and much of his leisure was devoted to his own experimental observations. Nevertheless, the book was completed in less than a year. Hasty and imperfect as it was, “The History and Present State of Electricity. With Original Experiments, illustrated with Copperplates,” was well received and ran through five editions in its author’s lifetime. Its publication at once stamped Priestley as a man of science; it secured him recognition as such in scientific circles at home and abroad, and was the immediate cause of his election, on June 12, 1766, into the Royal Society. The growing interest in the subject induced him to put together a Familiar Introduction to the Study of Electricity, which had also a considerable measure of success and was the means of popularising a knowledge of the main facts then known concerning Frictional Electricity. Priestley was instrumental in reviving the use of large electrical machines and batteries. The first of the large machines for which Nairne became famous was constructed in consequence of a request made to Priestley by the Grand Duke of Tuscany to procure for him the best machine that could be made in England. One of his machines, which figured in his History, and also in his Familiar Introduction, is in the possession of the Royal Society.

CHAPTER V

Goes to Leeds as minister of the Mill Hill Chapel—Resumes his studies in Speculative Theology—The Theological Repository—Becomes a Unitarian—Priestley as a controversialist—His Theory and Practice of Perspective—His literary characteristics—Begins his inquiries on Pneumatic Chemistry—His invention of soda-water—Receives the Copley Medal of the Royal Society.

Although Priestley lived in philosophic contentment with his lot at Warrington, happy in his occupations and in the society of congenial colleagues, the circumstances of the Academy were not fortunate. The institution never wholly recovered from the unhappy differences between the trustees and the first head of the Educational Staff, and in time many of the subscribers grew lukewarm in their support. Priestley had a remarkable power of adapting himself to his environment; he was one of the most even-tempered of men and had a capacity for being cheerful that would have extorted admiration even from Socrates. “But,” says Miss Aiken, “the Alma Mater of Warrington was ever a niggardly recompense of the distinguished abilities and virtues which were enlisted in her service.” One hundred pounds a year, with a house and a few boarders—hungry lads at £15 a year, exclusive of washing and candles—meant little towards the res angusta domi. Moreover, little Sarah Priestley had made her appearance, and the uncertain prospects which were before that young lady, coupled with the condition of her mother’s health, which was not wholly satisfactory at Warrington, led him to contemplate the expediency of giving up school-mastering and of resuming his profession of the ministry. Accordingly he was induced to accept an invitation to take charge of the congregation of Mill Hill Chapel, at Leeds, where he was already pretty well known, and thither he removed in 1767.[12]

Although it was no part of his duty to preach when at Warrington, he had from choice continued the practice, and wishing to maintain the character of a Dissenting minister, he had, as we have already seen, been ordained whilst there. His tendency to stammer was still a difficulty. Indeed, whilst at Nantwich it was so marked that he had almost resolved to abandon the calling. By reading aloud and very slowly every day, and by taking pains, he in some measure got the better of his defect, but he never wholly overcame it.

At Leeds he found a liberal, friendly and harmonious congregation, to whom his services, of which he was not sparing, were very acceptable. There, he says, he had no unreasonable prejudices to contend with, so that he had full scope for every kind of exertion. His activity and zeal in the special duties of his office led him to prepare and print catechisms for the young and to form various classes of catechumens and to instruct them in the principles of religion. He also published discourses on “Family Prayer,” on the “Lord’s Supper” and on “Church Discipline,” some of which were not altogether to the liking of members of the Established Church. Indeed, the first of his controversial pieces was written in answer to some angry remarks on one of these discourses written by a clergyman in the neighbourhood.

His return to the active duties of the ministry naturally induced him to resume the studies in Speculative Theology which had occupied him at Needham but which had been in large measure interrupted by the business of teaching at Nantwich and Warrington. He now published his Institutes of Natural and Revealed Religion, and began the publication of The Theological Repository, a collection of papers on theological questions, contributed by himself and a number of neighbouring ministers and others. The work eventually extended to six volumes, three of which were printed whilst he was at Leeds.

“The Theological Repository,” says the Rev. Charles Wicksteed,[13] “was one of those publications which will always appear from time to time in every body in which there is much activity and much freedom of thought. It had, however, a very slender circulation, and was very little read by any but theologians of the Liberal school. Indeed, it discussed questions which were viewed with terror by many even of the Liberal school itself, because it, in fact, purposely deserted the beaten track of opinion and opened out those questions on which difficulties began to be felt, or on which fresh light was wanted. It aimed at collecting the contributions of free, independent and thoughtful minds—towards correct ultimate decisions, without pretending itself to furnish those decisions. This is ever a position which the bigoted violently resent, which the unlearned cannot understand, on which even the candid and liberal often look with a dissatisfaction not unmingled with fear, but which is, notwithstanding, the essential preliminary of correct settled opinion in every age of thought. It is a position often assumed by the most contemplative and the most thoroughly honest men of the generation, but one which is never understood until the generation which produced and neglected it is passed. If there were not this neutral ground on which inquiring spirits can meet, beyond the hackneyed and settled points in which alone the many are interested, there would be an end to thought, which in a short time would prove an end to active, healthy, influential and tested truth.”

Shortly after his removal to Leeds, Priestley avowed himself an adherent to that school of theological opinion which its enemies associate with the name of Fausto Sozzini; that is, he became what has been called a humanitarian, or a believer in the doctrine that Jesus Christ was in nature solely and truly a man, however highly exalted by God.

Sozzini’s doctrine brought down upon its teacher the ill-will of a Cracow mob; his house was wrecked, his books and manuscripts destroyed, his life threatened, and he was driven from the city. Two hundred years later the Socinian Priestley went through precisely the same experience. Wrecking the homes, pillaging the property and injuring the persons of heresiarchs might seem an extraordinary way of identifying oneself with the doctrine of the gentle author of the Sermon on the Mount if history had not made us pretty familiar with such spectacles. At Leeds, as already stated, Priestley published the first of the series of controversial pieces on religion and politics which ceased only with his death. By some strange irony of fate this man, who was by nature one of the most peaceable and peace-loving of men, singularly calm and dispassionate, not prone to disputation or given to wrangling, acquired the reputation of being perhaps the most cantankerous man of his time, who delighted in tilting against established usage, and whose hand, Ishmael-like, was against every man’s. By sheer force of circumstances he became an indefatigable pamphleteer, apparently ever ready to vindicate the cause of civil and religious liberty, to champion the principles and conduct of Dissenters, and to attack what he considered the inveterate prejudices of the prevailing religion of his countrymen.

As a controversialist his methods were beyond reproach, and the arts of casuistry were wholly foreign to his character. He was so obviously sincere and fair-minded that he frequently overcame prejudice and disarmed criticism by his unconscious unwritten appeal to the finer instincts of his adversaries. He made many enemies but he won far more friends: the enemies were for the most part men whom history willingly lets die; the friends were of every sect, and some of them were among the chief glories of the eighteenth century.

The following characteristic letter to his friend, Miss Aiken, is interesting as illustrating the action of the active, eager mind which, as its owner says, found scope for every kind of exertion at this period of his life:—

“Leeds, 13th June 1769.

“Dear Miss Aikin,—You will be surprised when I tell you I write this on the behalf of Pascal Paoli and the brave Corsicans, but it is strictly true. Mr Turner of Wakefield, who says he reads your poems, not with admiration, but astonishment, insists upon my writing to you to request that a copy of your poem, called Corsica, may be sent to Mr Boswell, with permission to publish it for the benefit of those noble islanders. He is confident that it cannot fail greatly to promote their interest, now that a subscription is open for them, by raising a generous ardour in the cause of liberty and admiration of their glorious struggle in its defence. Its being written by a lady, he thinks, will be a circumstance very much in their favour and that of the poem, but there is no occasion for Mr Boswell to be acquainted with your name unless it be your own choice some time hence. I own I entirely agree with Mr Turner in these sentiments, and therefore hope Miss Aikin will not refuse so reasonable a request, which will, at the same time, lay a great obligation on her friends in England and contribute to the relief of her own heroes in Corsica. Consider that you are as much a general as Tyrtæus was, and your poems (which, I am confident, are much better than his ever were) may have as great an effect as his. They may be the coup de grace to the French troops in that island, and Paoli, who reads English, will cause it to be printed in every history of that renowned island.

“Without any joke, I wish you would comply with this request. In this case you have only to send a corrected copy to me at Leeds, to Mr Johnson in London, and I will take care to introduce it to the notice of Mr Boswell by means of Mr Vaughan or Mrs Macauley, or some other of the friends of liberty and Corsica in London. The sooner this is done the better. Mr Turner regrets very much that it was not done some time ago. I shall not tell you what I think of your poems for more than twenty reasons, one of which is that I am not able to express it. We are now all expectation at the opening of every packet from Warrington.

“My piece on Perspective is nearly ready for the press. Come and see us before it is quite printed, and I will engage to teach you the whole art and mystery of it in a few hours. If you come a month after I may know no more about the matter than anybody else. I am about to make a bolder push than ever for the pillory, the King’s Bench Prison, or something worse. Tell Mr Aikin he may hug himself that I have no connection with the Academy. On Monday next Mr Turner and I set out on a visit to the Archdeacon at Richmond.

“With all our compliments to all your worthy family, I am, with the greatest cordiality, your friend and admirer,

“J. Priestley.”

Pasquale de Paoli, the Corsican patriot, whose struggles to secure the independence of his native island had excited warm sympathy in England and had enlisted the pen of Boswell, was at that time a refugee in this country, having been defeated, after a stubborn resistance, by the French under Count Vaux. The poem on “Corsica,” one of the earliest and most beautiful of Miss Aikin’s productions, was written in 1768, at about the period of the appearance of Boswell’s Account of Corsica, but it was first published in 1773 in a collection of her poems, of which four editions, the first in 4to, the three others in 8vo were printed in that year.

The copy seen by Priestley was in manuscript. Whether it was shown to Boswell or to Paoli is not recorded.

The piece on Perspective was published in 1770, under the title of “A Familiar Introduction to the Theory and Practice of Perspective. With copperplates.” He gave as his reason for writing it that, having occasion to make drawings of philosophical instruments and apparatus he had felt the need of a work treating of perspective. It will be seen in the various editions of his works that the words “Priestley del” are engraved at the left-hand corner of the copperplates of the illustrations. The book had a considerable sale and was frequently recommended by drawing-masters. A second edition appeared in 1782 and it continued to be used well into the nineteenth century.

It is interesting to note that the first printed account of the use of india-rubber for the purpose of erasing lead pencil marks occurs in the preface to this work. It ran thus:—

“Since this work was printed off I have seen a substance excellently adapted to the purpose of wiping off from paper the marks of black lead pencil. It must therefore be of singular use to those who practise drawing. It is sold by Mr Nairne, mathematical instrument maker, opposite the Royal Exchange. He sells a cubical piece of about half an inch for three shillings, and he says it will last several years.”

The “bolder push than ever for the pillory, the King’s Bench Prison, or something worse,” probably refers to the anonymous pieces which he published in support of “Wilkes and Liberty” in the course of the memorable struggle between the freeholders of Middlesex and the House of Commons concerning the rights of free representation by parliamentary constituencies which at that time agitated the country. Wilkes had shortly before the date of this letter been fined by the King’s Bench £1000 and sentenced to twenty-two months’ imprisonment for publishing an impious libel, and had been expelled from the House of Commons—to which, however, he was repeatedly returned by the electors of Middlesex.

The Richmond visit to Archdeacon Blackburne, whose son had been at the Warrington Academy, is memorable from the circumstance that on its occasion Priestley first met Theophilus Lindsey, with whom he contracted an intimate and lasting friendship, which greatly influenced the lives and fortunes of both, and of which Priestley subsequently wrote that it had been a source of more real satisfaction to him than any other circumstance in his whole life.

The busy pamphleteer found time, however, to put together more ambitious works than Wilkes and Liberty. The success of his History of Electricity induced him to attempt the compilation of the history of all the branches of experimental philosophy, and he made proposals to publish a History of Discoveries Relating to Vision Light and Colours. The subscription to this work was not, however, sufficient to induce him to proceed, and after a considerable outlay in the purchase of books and other material the project was abandoned.

Priestley was, perhaps, the most industrious bookmaker of his age. Boswell indeed dubbed him a “literary Jack-of-all-Trades,” and he was busy with proof-sheets even to the day of his death. In fact, the closing act of his life, before he put his hand to his face to hide the last flicker of the vital spark, was to make a correction in a proof-sheet. He usually composed in shorthand, and much of this work was done in the family circle, sitting by the parlour fire. Conversation never disturbed him. Although his style is somewhat prolix, his language is simple and direct and his meaning invariably clear. Charges that his writings were hasty performances in nowise disturbed him. Indeed, he was wont to say that some of those that were most hurriedly done were among those that were best received. Whatever might have been the time he spent on their composition he was confident that more would not have contributed to their perfection in any essential particular, and about anything farther he was never very solicitous. His object, he said, was not to acquire the character of a fine writer but of a useful one. Pecuniary gain was never the chief object of his work; several of his books, indeed, were written with the prospect of certain loss. Many writers before and since the great lexicographer have left us what they have imagined to have been the secret of their success as literary craftsmen, and have told us of the means by which they gained their proficiency of composition and mastery of style. Priestley has no pretensions to be considered a master of style; nevertheless, it is of interest to learn how he acquired facility in writing the simple, unaffected English which characterises his literary work. It came, he said, from a practice of committing to writing as much as he could of the sermons he heard, and of composing much in verse. With regard to the sermons, he says:—

“This practice I began very early, and continued it until I was able from the heads of a discourse to supply the rest myself. For, not troubling myself to commit to memory much of the amplification, and writing at home almost as much as I had heard, I insensibly acquired a habit of composing with great readiness, and from this practice I believe I have derived great advantage through life, composition seldom employing so much time as would be necessary to write in long hand anything I have published.”

As regards the verses, he says:—

“I was myself far from having any pretension to the character of a poet, but in the early part of my life I was a great versifier, and this, I believe, as well as my custom of writing after preachers, mentioned before, contributed to the ease with which I always wrote prose.”

If Priestley was not himself a poet, he was at least the cause of poetry in another. Miss Aikin once told him that it was the perusal of some verses of his that first induced her fledgling muse to soar—so that, he adds, “this country is in some measure indebted to me for one of the best poets it can boast of.” No example of Priestley’s abilities as a “versifier” has come down to us, but in that dainty little sketch of the Warrington society, by Miss Lucy Aikin, from which we have already quoted, allusion is made to his accomplishment.

“Both bouts rimés and vers de société were in fashion with the set. Once it was their custom to slip anonymous pieces into Mrs Priestley’s work-bag. One ‘copy of verses,’ a very eloquent one, puzzled all guessers a long time; at length it was traced to Dr Priestley’s self.”

To the man of science the special interest of Priestley’s connection with Leeds arises from the fact that he began there that fruitful series of inquiries, relating to what he called “the doctrine of air,” which eventually raised him to the position of one of the greatest chemical discoverers of his time. The house in which he first lived whilst at Leeds was in Meadow Lane and adjoined the public brew house of Jakes and Nell. He was thereby led, in the outset, to amuse himself by making experiments on the “fixed air,” or carbonic acid, which is largely produced in the process of fermentation. When he removed to his second house in Basinghall Street, on the site where the schools now stand, he was under the necessity of making the fixed air for himself; and, as he distinctly and faithfully notes in his various publications on the subject, he was led to make one experiment after another until he became, what he does not state, the greatest master of pneumatic chemistry of his age.

When he began these experiments he tells us he knew very little of chemistry. Indeed, he says he had in a manner no idea on the subject before his attention was drawn to it in a course of lectures delivered in the Warrington Academy by Dr Turner of Liverpool. But, as he says, on the whole, this circumstance was no disadvantage to him, as in the situation in which he found himself he was led to devise an apparatus and processes of his own adapted to his peculiar views. If he had been previously accustomed to the usual chemical processes he might not have so easily thought of any other; and without new modes of operation he thinks he should hardly have discovered anything materially new. His means did not permit him to purchase expensive apparatus. Indeed, this very circumstance materially contributed to his success by making his apparatus so simple that his experiments could be readily repeated and their accuracy thereby ensured.

His first contribution to Pneumatic Chemistry was published in 1772. It was a small pamphlet on a method of impregnating water with fixed air, which, being immediately translated into French, excited a great degree of attention to the subject, and this was much increased by the publication of his first experimental paper in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.

Priestley’s earliest method of impregnating water with carbonic acid consisted in exposing it to the gas above the surface of fermenting wort. This process was no doubt accompanied with many disadvantages and the resulting solution could not have been very palatable. Later on he adopted the method originally employed by Lane in 1709, although apparently in ignorance of Lane’s paper in the Philosophical Transactions, of making the gas from chalk and sulphuric acid and leading it directly into the water by means of a flexible tube provided with an intercepting bladder to retain any solid or acid substance projected from the effervescent materials in the generating flask. At about this period increased attention was being paid to the question of the supply of drinking water in the Navy, owing to the publication of Irving’s plan of making fresh water from sea-water by distillation, and Priestley conceived the idea that if some ready means could be devised of impregnating water with carbonic acid on shipboard the solution might be useful as a preventive of sea scurvy.

Priestley brought his idea to the knowledge of the Duke of Northumberland, and showed a sample of the impregnated water to Sir George Savile, who introduced him to Lord Sandwich, at that time First Lord of the Admiralty in Lord North’s Administration. The Board of Admiralty thought the matter was of sufficient importance to ask for a report from the College of Physicians, and Priestley was requested to appear before that body in order to explain and illustrate his process. The report from the College was favourable, and in consequence two war-ships were fitted with the apparatus.

The idea that scurvy, in common with other so-called putrid diseases, was due to an insufficient supply of “fixed air” in the animal economy, and that it might be cured by the administration of that gas, originated with Dr Macbride about the middle of the eighteenth century, shortly after Black had established the individuality of the gas, and it was current doctrine with the faculty at the time of Priestley’s experiments. The reasons which Macbride gave in support of his hypothesis are contained in his Essays on Medical and Philosophical Subjects, and are sufficiently ingenious to be worth stating as characteristic of much of the therapeutics of the time. Macbride assumed that substances held together, and acquired the quality of firmness, by virtue of containing a “cementing principle,” which ensured the perfect cohesion of their constituent particles, and that as putrefaction resulted in the decomposition and disintegration of substances, putridity was connected with the loss or disappearance of this cementing or cohering principle. He found that “fixed air” was invariably produced when animal and vegetable substances putrefy, that a greater amount of fixed air is produced from vegetable substances than from animal substances, and that animal and vegetable matters putrefy more rapidly when mixed than when separate, and yield more fixed air in conjunction than apart.

On the basis of these observations Macbride proceeded to explain the well-established fact that a diet mainly composed of animal food is apt to produce sea scurvy, the remedy for which is a sufficient supply of fresh vegetables, by assuming that the virtue of the vegetables was due to the evolution of a greater amount of carbonic acid in the process of digestion, the fixed air so liberated in the body counteracting, by its antiseptic powers, putridity in the circulating fluids.

We are not here concerned with the subsequent history of so-called ærated or soda-water, as it came to be called, but it is worth noting that Priestley’s account of his process contains one remark which is not without significance in view of latter-day developments. He says:—

“I do not doubt but that, by the help of a condensing engine, water might be much more highly impregnated with the virtues of the Pyrmont spring, and it would not be difficult to contrive a method of doing it.”

The manufacture of these waters was subsequently taken up by Priestley’s friend and satellite, as he called himself, Richard Bewley, of Great Massingham, an apothecary, and the inventor of the well-known “mephitic julep.” Bewley appears to have discovered that the addition of a small quantity of carbonate of soda to the water enabled it to absorb and retain an increased quantity of carbonic acid, and to him, therefore, is due the credit of first making what was long called “acidulous soda-water.” The receipt for its manufacture and use, given by Henry of Manchester, is sufficiently quaint to be worth reproduction:—

“To prepare Mr Bewley’s julep dissolve three drachms of fossil alkali in each quart of water, and throw in streams of fixed air till the alkaline taste be destroyed. This julep should not be prepared in too large quantities, and should be kept in bottles very closely corked and sealed. Four ounces of it may be taken at a time, drinking a draught of lemonade or water acidulated with vinegar or weak spirit of vitriol, by which means the fixed air will be extricated in the stomach.”

It is hardly to be supposed that the Royal Society Club in 1773 adopted all the social manners and customs of the period. Nevertheless, its members, who were among the most influential fellows of the Society, were evidently greatly impressed with the merits of Priestley’s soda-water, since the Council of the Society were moved to reward its discoverer with the Copley Medal.

In making the award on St Andrew’s Day 1773, Sir John Pringle, then President of the Royal Society, said:—

“For having learned from Dr Black that this fixed or mephitic air could in great abundance be procured from chalk by means of diluted spirits of vitriol; from Dr Macbride that this fluid was of a considerable antiseptic nature; from Dr Cavendish that it could in a large quantity be absorbed by water; and from Dr Brownrigg that it was this very air which gave the briskness and chief virtues to the Spa and Pyrmont waters; Dr Priestley, I say, so well instructed, conceived that common water impregnated with this fluid alone might be useful in medicine, particularly for sailors on long voyages, for curing or preventing the sea scurvy.”

To-day the Copley Medal is regarded as the highest award which it is in the power of the Society to bestow, and certainly no man starts his scientific career by acquiring it—not even for so signal an invention as that of soda-water.

Whilst Priestley was at Leeds a proposal was made to him that he should accompany Captain Cook in his second voyage to the South Seas. It probably arose from his connection with the Admiralty in the matter of his invention. He tells us that as the terms were very advantageous he consented to it, the heads of his congregation agreeing to keep an assistant to supply his place during his absence. But Mr Banks informed him that he was objected to by some clergymen in the Board of Longitude, who had the direction of this business, on account of his religious principles. “Whether,” said Huxley, in commenting on this circumstance in the course of his speech at the unveiling of the Priestley statue in Birmingham in 1874, “these worthy ecclesiastics feared that Priestley’s presence among the ship’s company might expose his Majesty’s sloop Resolution to the fate which aforetime befell a certain ship that went from Joppa to Tarshish, or whether they were alarmed lest a Socinian should undermine that piety which in the days of Commodore Trunnion so strikingly characterised sailors, does not appear.” The appointment was given to Reinhold Forster, a man, as Priestley fully admitted, far better qualified for the position.

CHAPTER VI

Becomes literary companion to Lord Shelburne—Goes abroad—His visit to Paris—His scientific work at Calne and in London—Continues his theological and metaphysical studies—His growing unpopularity—Leaves Lord Shelburne.

Priestley continued at Leeds for about six years. Although very happy there he was tempted to leave Mill Hill Chapel to enter the service of Lord Shelburne. How he was regarded by his flock may be gleaned from the addresses which were presented to him on the eve of his departure; these, together with his own farewell letter, are still preserved among the Chapel books of Mill Hill. But a stipend of one hundred guineas a year, and a house which was not adequate to contain a family now increased by the birth of two sons, and with no possibility of making any provision for them in the event of his death, induced him to accept Lord Shelburne’s proposals.

Lord Shelburne, afterwards first Marquis of Lansdowne, one of the most enlightened of the many politicians who sought to direct the destinies of this kingdom during the stormy times of the last thirty years of the eighteenth century, had been Secretary of State in Pitt’s administration of 1766, but had been dismissed from office in 1768 on account of his conciliatory policy towards America, and at this particular time was living in retirement at Bowood. Under these circumstances his lordship, a man of culture and fond of literature, sought the companionship of some kindred spirit. Through the good offices of Dr Price, a mutual friend, he was led to make Priestley so generous an offer—viz., two and a half times his Leeds salary, a pleasant house at Calne in the summer and a house in town during the winter, and a retiring allowance for life should their connection be dissolved—that our philosopher was constrained to accept a position which, despite its perils and possible constraints, was so alluring. The engagement seems to have given satisfaction also to Priestley’s friends, if we may judge from the following extract from one of Wedgwood’s letters to his partner at Etruria, Thomas Bentley of Liverpool, one of the founders of the Warrington Academy:—

“I am glad to hear of Dr Priestley’s noble appointment, taking it for granted that he is to go on writing and publishing with the same freedom he now does, otherwise I had much rather he still remained in Yorkshire.” Meteyard, II. 451.

In their political sentiments, and in their views on the great questions which at that time divided parties, the two men had much in common. Lord Shelburne was certainly not unaware of Priestley’s political proclivities, and the pamphlet he had written at Franklin’s instigation on the American question probably expressed his Lordship’s own sentiments. At the same time Priestley was under no obligation to serve Lord Shelburne politically, and there is no evidence that any such service was either expected or rendered. His office was nominally that of librarian, but he had little to do in that capacity beyond arranging and cataloguing the books and numerous manuscripts at Bowood and Lansdowne House and making an index of Lord Shelburne’s private papers. Indeed, Lord Shelburne treated him rather as a companion and friend than as a servant, taking him, in the second year of his engagement, on a journey through Flanders, Holland and Germany as far as Strasburg, and spending a month in Paris. The time he spent on the Continent made him sensible of the benefit of foreign travel, even without the advantage of much conversation with foreigners. Indeed, he says the very sight of new countries, buildings and customs of an unfamiliar type, even the very hearing of a fresh language, however unintelligible, stimulates and widens the mind and gives it new ideas. He saw everything to the best advantage and without any anxiety or trouble, and he had an opportunity of meeting and conversing with every person of eminence wherever he went, the political characters by Lord Shelburne’s connections and the literary and scientific ones by his own. One of these was Magellan, or Magalhæns, a Portuguese Jesuit descended from the great navigator of that name. He resided in England, where he died in, or shortly before, 1790. He had early information on scientific matters from abroad, and was frequently employed in procuring English instruments for foreigners. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society and an active correspondent of Lavoisier’s, to whom he sent all scientific memoirs published in England, Priestley’s among the number. Magellan was the subject of a notable trial at law—one of the last indeed of its kind in England. He was indicted at the suit of a common informer under the statute against saying Mass, but the suit, which was heard before Lord Mansfield, was dismissed on some point of legal informality.

It was, no doubt, mainly through Magellan that Priestley was brought into the society of that brilliant galaxy of men of science which at that period was the glory of France. In some respects he was out of sympathy with this environment, and, as he confesses, soon tired of Paris. Priestley never obtruded his religious convictions on any company he might be in; at the same time he never forgot that he was a Christian and a minister of religion. What is now called Agnosticism was at least as prevalent during the latter half of the eighteenth century as at any period of the history of Europe. Priestley tells us that a great part of the company he saw at Lord Shelburne’s did not really know what Christianity was, and Lord Shelburne numbered among his friends and political associates almost all who were intellectually eminent at that time in this country. He was not unprepared, therefore, to find that all the philosophers to whom he was introduced at Paris were unbelievers in Christianity and even professed Atheists. He was told, indeed, by some of them that he was the only person they had ever met with, of whose understanding they had any opinion, who professed to believe Christianity. It was this experience which caused Priestley to write his Letters to a Philosophical Unbeliever. He says that as he had conversed so much with unbelievers at home and abroad he thought he should be able to combat their prejudices with advantage. Indeed, he was wont to say that the greatest satisfaction he received from the success of his philosophical pursuits arose from the genuine weight it gave to his attempts to defend the principles of Christianity and to free it from those corruptions which prevent its reception with philosophical and thinking persons.

Of the many advantages he enjoyed through his connection with Lord Shelburne, Priestley was always fully sensible. It came to him at the most opportune period of his career, and in the full tide of his intellectual vigour. The years he spent in this association were, so far at least as science is concerned, the most fruitful of his life. Lord Shelburne was a generous patron, and particularly encouraged Priestley in his chemical inquiries, affording him ample opportunity for their prosecution and defraying much of the expense they occasioned. He had pleasure in witnessing his experiments, and frequently requested him to exhibit them to his guests, particularly to foreigners, by whom a knowledge of Priestley’s work was thus spread abroad.

Priestley’s energies were, however, not wholly engrossed by his scientific labours. Theology and metaphysics still claimed much of his time, and to this period belongs the concluding portion of his Institutes of Natural and Revealed Religion and his Harmony of the Gospels, and his Disquisitions relating to Matter and Spirit. He also at this time wrote some Miscellaneous Observations relating to Education, and published his Warrington Lectures on Oratory and Criticism, which he dedicated to his patron’s eldest son, Lord Fitzmaurice.

Certain of these publications occasioned considerable uproar at the time of their appearance: the outcry indeed was such, he says, as could hardly have been imagined. He was attacked in almost every newspaper, and in the greater number of the periodicals, as an unbeliever in revelation and no better than an Atheist. In the preface to his Institutes of Natural and Revealed Religion he had been led to question the principles of Reid, Beattie and Oswald with respect to their doctrine of common sense, which they had made to supersede all rational inquiry into the subject of religion, and he subsequently developed the attack in a separate publication. He expressed his belief in the doctrine of philosophical necessity and his admiration of Hartley’s theory of the human mind. He had uttered some doubt of the immateriality of the sentient principle in man, and after giving, as he says, the closest attention to the subject, he was firmly persuaded that man is wholly material, and that our only prospect of immortality is from the Christian doctrine of a resurrection.

Priestley clearly recognised that many of these publications were not calculated to improve his relations with Lord Shelburne. Indeed, he says several attempts were made by Lord Shelburne’s friends, though none by himself, to dissuade him from persisting in them.

He goes on to say that:—