At Nottingham you will surely be more likely to obtain audiences; and, I doubt not, you will find a hospitable reception there. I was treated by many families with kindliness, by some with a zeal of affection. Write me if you go and when you go. Now for your pamphlet. It is well written, and the doctrine sound, although sometimes, I think, deduced falsely. For instance (p. iii.): It is _true_ that all a man's children, "however begotten, whether in marriage or out," are his heirs in nature, and ought to be so in true policy; but, instead of tacitly allowing that I meant by it to encourage what Mr. B.[154] and the priests would call licentiousness (and which surely, Thelwall, in the _present state of society_ you must allow to be injustice, inasmuch as it deprives the woman of her respectability in the opinions of her neighbours), I would have shown that such a law would of all others operate most powerfully in _favour_ of _marriage_; by which word I mean not the effect of spells uttered by conjurers, but permanent cohabitation useful to society as the best conceivable means (in the present state of society, at least) of ensuring nurture and systematic education to infants and children. We are but frail beings at present, and want such motives to the practice of our duties. Unchastity may be no vice,--I think it is,--but it may be no vice, abstractly speaking; yet from a variety of causes unchaste women are almost without exception careless mothers. _Wife_ is a solemn name to me because of its influence on the more solemn duties of _mother_. Such passages (p. 30 is another of them) are offensive. They are mere _assertions_, and of course can convince no person who thinks differently; and they give pain and irritate. I write so frequently to you on this subject, because I have reason to _know_ that passages of this order did give very general offence in your first part, and have operated to retard the sale of the second. If they had been arguments or necessarily connected with your main argument, I am not the man, Thelwall, who would oppose the filth of prudentials merely to have it swept away by the indignant torrent of your honesty. But as I said before, they are mere _assertions_; and certainly their truth is not self-evident. With the exception of these passages, the pamphlet is the best I have read since the commencement of the war; warm, not fiery, well-seasoned without being dry, the periods harmonious yet avoiding metrical harmony, and the ornaments so dispersed as to set off the features of truth without turning the attention on themselves. I account for its slow sale partly from your having compared yourself to Christ in the first (which gave great offence, to my knowledge, although very foolishly, I confess), and partly from the sore and fatigued state of men's minds, which disqualifies them for works of principle that exert the intellect without agitating the passions. But it has not been reviewed yet, has it? I read your narrative and was almost sorry I had read it, for I had become much interested, and the abrupt "no more" jarred me. I never heard before of your variance with Horne Tooke. Of the poems, the two Odes are the best. Of the two Odes, the last, I think; it is in the best style of Akenside's best Odes. Several of the sonnets are pleasing, and whenever I was pleased I paused, and imaged you in my mind in your captivity.... _My Ode_[155] by this time you are conscious that you have praised too highly. With the exception of "I unpartaking of the evil thing," which line I do not think _injudiciously_ weak, I accede to all your remarks, and shall alter accordingly. Your remark that the line on the Empress had more of Juvenal than Pindar _flashed itself_ on my mind. I had admired the line before, but I became immediately of your opinion, and that criticism has convinced me that your nerves are exquisite _electrometers_[156] of taste. You forgot to point out to me that the whole childbirth of Nature is at once ludicrous and disgusting, an epigram smart yet bombastic. The review of Bryant's pamphlet is good--the sauce is better than the fish. Speaking of Lewis's death, surely you forget that the legislature of France were to act by _laws_ and not by general morals; and that they violated the law which they themselves had made. I will take in the "Corresponding Society Magazine." That good man, James Losh, has just published an admirable treatise translated from the French of Benjamin Constant,[157] entitled, "Consideration on the Strength of the Present Government of France." "Woe to that country when crimes are punished by crimes, and where men murder in the name of justice." I apply this to the death of the mistaken but well-meaning Lewis.[158] I never go to Bristol.