ocity and grossness in his
manners, which seem by no means to have been indicated in his purer
days. His youth was disgraced by no irregularities--it was studious
and honourable. But he was now quick at vilifying the greatest
characters; and having a perfect contempt for all mankind, was
resolved to live by making one half of the world laugh at the other.
Such is the direction which disappointed genius has too often given to
its talents.

He first affected oratory, and something of a theatrical attitude in
his sermons, which greatly attracted the populace; and he startled
those preachers who had so long dozed over their own sermons, and who
now finding themselves with but few slumberers about them, envied
their Ciceronian brothers.

Tuning his voice, and balancing his hands.

It was alleged against Henley, that "he drew the people too much from
their parish churches, and was not so proper for a London divine as a
rural pastor." He was offered a rustication, on a better living; but
Henley did not come from the country to return to it.

There is a narrative of the life of Henley, which, subscribed by another
person's name, he himself inserted in his "Oratory Transactions."[47]
As he had to publish himself this highly seasoned biographical
morsel, and as his face was then beginning to be "embrowned with
bronze," he thus very impudently and very ingeniously apologises for
the panegyric:--

"If any remark of the writer appears favourable to myself, and be
judged apocryphal, it may, however, weigh in the opposite scale to
some things less obligingly said of me; false praise being as
pardonable as false reproach."[48]

In this narrative we are told, that when at college--

"He began to be uneasy that he had not the liberty of thinking,
without incurring the scandal of heterodoxy; he was impatient that
systems of all sorts were put into his hands ready carved out for him;
it shocked him to find that he was commanded to believe against his
judgment, and resolved some time or other to enter his protest against
any person being bred like a slave, who is born an Englishman."

This is all very decorous, and nothing can be objected to the first
cry of this reforming patriot but a reasonable suspicion of its truth.
If these sentiments were really in his mind at college, he deserves at
least the praise of retention: for fifteen years were suffered to pass
quietly without the patriotic volcano giving even a distant rumbling