The charge of blasphemous libel was decided upon, after much consultation, as the strongest that could be brought to bear upon Carlile, as in that case the help and strength of the Church could be had, and the minds of the people could be turned from the contemplation of that bloody affair at Manchester. So our hero was marked for slaughter. The fiat had gone forth! Judge, Attorney-General, and all the prosecutors were whipped into line and made to try this case and find this verdict, however reluctant they might have been, and _were_, to do so.
With this view of the case, which I believe to be the correct one, the reader will more readily comprehend how those stingingly sarcastic letters to Gifford must have stung and rankled in the wounds.
Carlile may be said to have travelled his native isle like the champion of old--always mounted on his charger of fearlessness, and armed cap-a-pie for the encounter of his enemies. They always knew where to find him, and he was always ready to do battle for the right and against wrong. He never skulked nor concealed himself, nor took ship to avoid his enemies. He wore his colors in his helmet in plain sight of all, with proud defiance, and if, as sometimes happened, he was for the time worsted in an encounter, he neither cringed nor fawned, nor asked for quarter. He nursed his wounds as best he might, and never wavered in his determination to fight for the right while life endured.
The names of the various publications brought out by Carlile indicated in a measure the attitude he assumed. They were the _Republican_, the _Deist_, the _Moralist_, the _Lion_, the _Prompter_, the _Gauntlet_, the _Christian Warrior_, the _Phoenix_, the _Scourge_, and the _Church_.
Carlile never changed the character of a paper to suit the times, but always stopped the old paper and started a new one whenever he felt that the old one had accomplished the purpose for which he had started it.
In the matter of praise and blame Carlile ran the whole gamut, from the highest _crescendo_ of approval to the _basso profundi_ of malediction. He was called "the intellectual Saviour" and the "moral regenerator of mankind" by his friends, and "the great Satan of the day" by his enemies; and he was equally unmoved by the extravagance of either. During the whole course of his public life he did not turn aside for one instant nor stray one foot from the path he had marked out for himself. Fines, confiscations, or imprisonments could not crush him, and we find him saying, on entering into the tenth year of imprisonment, that "he was now well seasoned for the fight"!