“Fragile in health and frame; of the purest habits in morals; full of devoted generosity and universal kindness; glowing with ardor to attain wisdom; resolved at every personal sacrifice to do right; burning with a desire for affection and sympathy,” a boy-under-graduate of Oxford, described as of tall, delicate, and fragile figure, with large and lively eyes, with expressive, beautiful and feminine features, with head covered with long, brown hair, of gracefulness and simplicity of manner, the heir to a title and the representation of one of the most ancient English families, which numbered Sir Philip Sidney on its roll of illustrious names, just sixty-four years ago, and in this nineteenth century, for no licentiousness, violence, or dishonor, but, for his refusal to criminate himself or inculpate friends, was, without trial, expelled by learned divines from his university for writing an argumentative thesis, which, if it had been the work of some Greek philosopher, would have been hailed by his judges as a fine specimen of profound analytical abstruseness—­for that expulsion are we the debtors to theological charity and tolerance for “Queen Mab.”

Excommunicated by a mercenary and abject priesthood, cast off by a savage father, the admirer of that gloomy theology founded by the murderer of Michael Servetus, and charged by his jealous brother writers as one of the founders of a Satanic School, for neither immorality of life nor breach of the parental relation, but for heterodoxy to an expiring system of dogmatism, and for acting on and asserting the right of man to think and judge for himself, a father was to have two children torn from him, in the sacred name of law and justice, by the principal adviser of a dying madman, “Defender of the Faith, by Law Established,” and by us despised as the self-willed tyrant, who lost America and poured out human blood like water to gratify his lust of power.  By that Lord Chancellor whose cold, impassive statue has a place in Westminster Abbey, where Byron’s was refused admittance, and whose memory, when that stone has crumbled into dust, will live as one who furnished an example for execrable tyranny over the parental tie, and that Lord Eldon whom an outraged father curses in imperishable verse: 

    “By thy most impious hell, and all its terrors;
        By all the grief, the madness and the guilt
     Of thine impostures, which must be their errors,
        That sand on which thy crumbling power is built;

* * * * *

     By all the hate which checks a father’s love;
        By all the scorn which kills a father’s care;
     By those most impious hands that dared remove
        Nature’s high bounds—­by thee, and by despair.

    “Yes, the despair which bids a father groan,
        And cry, ’my children are no longer mine. 
     The blood within those veins may be mine own,
        But, tyrant, their polluted souls are thine.’