communicative of his great knowledge.’[37] Although a man of retiring habits and much personal humility, he was bold as a lion when occasion demanded, and never hesitated to sacrifice interest of any kind to his sincere, but often strangely contracted ideas of truth and duty.  It was his lot to suffer loss of goods under either king, James II. and William.  Under the former he not only lost the rent of his Irish estates,[38] but had his name[39] on the murderous act of attainder to which James, to his great disgrace, attached his signature in 1689.  Under the latter he was deprived of his preferment in Oxford, and under a harsher rule might have incurred yet graver penalties.  ‘He has set his heart,’ said William of him, ’on being a martyr, and I have set mine on disappointing him.’[40] He died at Shottisbrooke in 1711.

After Kettlewell’s death, no one was so intimate with Robert Nelson as Dr. George Hickes.  They lived near together[41] in Ormond Street, and for the last eleven years of Nelson’s life met almost daily.  In forming any estimate of Hickes’s character, the warm-hearted esteem with which Nelson regarded him[42] should not be lost sight of.  Whatever were his faults, he must have possessed many high qualities to have thus completely won the heart of so good a man.  The feeling was fully reciprocated; and those who knew with what intensity of blind zeal Hickes attached himself to the interests of his party, must have been surprised that this intimacy was not interrupted even by his sore disappointment at Nelson’s defection from the nonjuring communion.  In Hickes there was nothing of the calm and tempered judgment which ruled in Nelson’s mind.  From the day that he vacated his deanery, and fixed up his indignant protest in Worcester Cathedral,[43] he threw his heart and soul into the nonjuring cause.  Unity might be a blessing, and schism a disaster; but it is doubtful whether he would have made the smallest concession in order to attain the one, or avoid the other.  Even Bishop Ken said of him that he showed zeal to make the schism incurable.[44] A good man, and a scholar of rare erudition, he possessed nevertheless the true temper of a bigot.  In middle life he had been brought into close acquaintance with the fanatic extravagances of Scotch Covenanters, his aversion to which might seem to have taught him, not the excellence of a more temperate spirit, but the desirability of rushing toward similar extremes in an opposite direction.  He delighted in controversy in proportion to its heat, and too often his pen was dipped in gall, when he directed the acuteness and learning which none denied to him against any who swerved, this way or that, from the narrow path of dogma and discipline which had been marked with his own approval.  Tillotson was ’an atheist,’[45] freethinkers were ‘the first-born sons of Satan,’ the Established Church was ’fallen into mortal schism,’[46] Ken, for thinking of reunion, was ’a half-hearted wheedler,’[47] Roman Catholics were ’as