power. Let the separation be only prompt
and amicable, and all would be well.

For this, as we see, our intelligent American
loyalist denounces him as an "anti-colonist;"
and much harder words were applied to him in
those days by men who had less excuse for
the error. Burke himself, in his impetuous
advocacy of America, refused to believe that
any man could have formed an opinion in
favour of separation except with the dishonest
motive of secretly helping the hostility of the
court, by making the colonies unpopular with
the people. He denounced the Dean of
Gloucester, therefore, "as one of those court
vermin who would do anything for the sake of
a bishoprick;" and was not moved to retract
the coarse insinuation even by Tucker's calm
and dignified reproof declaring his independence
of both parties, and that his opinions had
been equally unpalatable to both. Burke's
attack, however, passionate and unthinking
as it was, was not, like Bishop Warburton's,
treacherous. The bishop assailed the dean
through the side of their common calling,
and, referring to the commercial arguments
by which the case for separation had been
urged, described him as a divine with whom
religion was a trade, and with whom trade
was a religion. "The bishop affects to
consider me with contempt," replied the dean,
calmly; "to which I say nothing. He
has sometimes spoken coarsely of me; to
which I replied nothing. He has said that
religion is my trade, and trade is my religion.
It is quite true that commerce and its
connections have been favourite objects of my
attention; and where is the crime? As for
religion, I have attended carefully to the duties
of my parish; nor have I neglected my cathedral.
The world knows something of me as a
writer on religious subjects; and I will add,
what the world does not know, that I have
written near three hundred sermons, and
preached them all again and again. My heart
is at ease on that score; and my conscience,
thank God! does not accuse me."

Such were the penalties then, as they have
ever been, and will probably continue to be,
attendant on having outstripped
contemporary opinion. There was hardly a question
on which Dean Tucker was not distinctly in
advance of his time. Though a strenuous
defender of religion against the infidel
attacks which were then so common, he was
not less the eager advocate of universal
toleration. He wrote against drunkenness,
against sports involving cruelty to the brute
creation, and against war. Nothing was too
grand, nothing too mean, if it affected a
single human interest, for the wise word
he had to utter. His great argument
for trade against territory, in which he
warned the sovereigns of Europe that the
proper cultivation of the land of their own
countries inappreciably exceeded in importance
any amount of acquisition of waste land in
other countries, was followed by his "earnest
and affectionate address to the common people
of England on their barbarous custom ot
cock-throwing on Shrove Tuesday." He was
the first to defend the naturalisation of
foreigners, to point out the necessity of a union
with Ireland, to denounce the impolicy of the
existing restraints against interchanges with
that country, to resist the taxation which then
fell so heavily on the industrious and the poor,
to oppose every kind of monopoly whether of
corporations or trading companies, to declare
the navigation laws a clog upon commerce, to
propose a plan for getting rid of slavery,
to call for the opening of canals, to point
out what advantages would result from the
establishment of a warehousing system, to
urge the necessity of improvement in the high
roads, to cry out against that East India
Company in which we only now begin to
detect an injustice too monstrous for
continuance or sufficiently ripe for redress, to insist
on the wisdom of permitting the free exportation
and importation of grain, and to
advocate perseveringly in its largest sense free
trade among all the nations of the earth,
"Ah!" exclaimed Doctor Johnson one day
at Thrale's; "another pamphlet by Tucker.
The Dean always tells me something which I
did not know before." Yet it was but a
short time after, that the dean was burnt in
effigy in his native town of Bristol, because
something in one of his pamphlets (it was an
argument for the naturalisation of the Jew)
had given high offence on 'Change, where less
tolerance for originality prevailed than in the
large heart of Samuel Johnson.

Nevertheless Doctor Tucker lived to see
his townsmen make something better than a
Guy of him, though of themselves perhaps
something worse; for he lived to see a
shouting mob unyoke the horses from his
carriage, against his remonstrance yoke
themselves instead, and draw him into Bristol
in triumph. It was a wonderful change, and
brought about in a curious way. In those
days, the reader will hardly require to be told,
there existed in full force a great many egregiously
foolish acts of parliament, called diversely
acts against Forestalling, Regrating, Badgering,
and Engrossing, but all passed with the same
silly purpose of putting senseless restraints
on trade, by preventing the merchant or
speculator from purchasing corn or other
provisions, in market or on their way to market,
and selling them again in the same place, or
within four miles of it. The professed object
was to prevent any unfair enhancement of
the prices of provisions; the almost invariable
result was to empty the markets of provisions
altogether; and never were the magistrates,
in their fullness of ignorance, so bent on
putting in force the law against Forestalling,
as at those times of pinch and pressure when
nothing but that very law obstructed relief.
A crisis of this kind occurred, and happened
to be sorely felt in Bristol, where a scarcity of
corn was threatened; whereupon straightway