■WILLIAM AND MABY.

165

were in issue between Protestants and Papists, Blount wasperfectly impartial. He was an infidel, and the head of a smallschool of infidels who were troubled with a morbid desire tomake converts. He translated from the Latin translation partof the Life of Apollonius of Tyana, and appended to it notes ofwhich the flippant profaneness called forth the severe censure ofan unbeliever of a very different order, the illustrious Bayle.*Blount also attacked Christianity in several original treatises,or rather in several treatises purporting to be original; for hewas the most audacious of literary thieves, and transcribed,without acknowledgment, whole pages from authors who hadpreceded him. His delight was to worry the priests by askingthem how light existed before the sun was made, how Paradisecould be bounded by Pison, Gihon, Hiddekel and Euphrates,how serpents moved before they were condemned to crawl, andwhere Eve found thread to stitch her figleaves. To his specula-tions on these subjects he gave the lofty name of the Oracles ofReason; and indeed whatever he said or wrote was consideredas oracular by his disciples. Of those disciples the most notedwas a bad writer named Gildon, who lived to pester anothergeneration with doggrel and slander, and whose memory is stillpreserved, not by his own voluminous works, but by two orthree lines in which his stupidity and venality have been con-temptuously mentioned by Pope. **

Little as either the intellectual or the moral character ofBlount may seem to deserve respect, it is in a great measure tohim that we must attribute the emancipation of the Englishpress. Between him and the licensers there was a feud of longstanding. Before the Revolution one of his heterodox treatises

* See the article on Apollonius in Bayle’s Dictionary. I say thatBlount made his translation from the Latin; for his works contain abundantproofs that he was not competent to translate from the Greek.

** See Gildon’s edition of Blount’s Works, 1695.

CHAP.

XIX.

1693 .