In our own country, it may be curious and edifying to observe to whom
we mainly owe those enlightened views on this subject, which might
have been expected to proceed in their natural channel, but for which
we look in vain, from the "triumphant heirs of universal praise," the
recognized guides of public opinion, whose fame sheds such a lustre on
our annals,--the Bacons, the Raleighs, the Seldens, the Cudworths, and
the Boyles.

The strangely assorted and rather grotesque band to whom we are
principally indebted for a vindication of outraged common sense and
insulted humanity in this instance, and whose vigorous exposition of
the absurdities of the prevailing system, in combination with other
lights and sources of intelligence, led at last to its being
universally abandoned, consists of four individuals--on any of whom a
literary Pharisee would look down with supercilious scorn:--a country
gentleman, devoted to husbandry, and deep in platforms of hop
gardens,[14]--a baronet, whose name for upwards of a century has been
used as a synonyme for incurable political bigotry,[15]--a little,
crooked, and now forgotten man, who died, as his biographer tells us,
"distracted, occasioned by a deep conceit of his own parts, and by a
continual bibbing of strong and high tasted liquors,"[16]--and last,
but not least assuredly, of one who was by turns a fanatical preacher
and an obscure practitioner of physic, and who passed his old age at
Clitheroe in Lancashire in attempting to transmute metals and discover
the philosopher's stone.[17] So strange a band of Apostles of reason
may occasion a smile; it deserves, at all events, a little more
particular consideration before we address ourselves to the short
narration which may be deemed necessary as an introduction to the
republication which follows.