tainly describe it? He had all the
shiftings of the double-faced _Janus_, and the revolutionary politics
of the ancient _Junius_. His godfathers sent him into the world in
cruel mockery, thus to remind their Irish boy of the fortunes that
await the desperately bold: nor did Toland forget the strong-marked
designations; for to his most objectionable work, the Latin tract
entitled _Pantheisticon_, descriptive of what some have considered as
an atheistical society, he subscribes these appropriate names, which
at the time were imagined to be fictitious.

Toland ran away from school and Popery. When in after-life he was
reproached with native obscurity, he ostentatiously produced a
testimonial of his birth and family, hatched up at a convent of Irish
Franciscans in Germany, where the good Fathers subscribed, with their
ink tinged with their Rhenish, to his most ancient descent, referring
to the Irish history! which they considered as a parish register, fit
for the suspected son of an Irish Priest!

Toland, from early life, was therefore dependent on patrons; but
illegitimate birth creates strong and determined characters, and
Toland had all the force and originality of self-independence. He was
a seed thrown by chance, to grow of itself wherever it falls.

This child of fortune studied at four Universities; at Glasgow,
Edinburgh, and Leyden; from the latter he passed to Oxford, and, in
the Bodleian Library, collected the materials for his after-studies.

He loved study, and even at a later period declares that "no
employment or condition of life shall make me disrelish the lasting
entertainment of books." In his "Description of Epsom," he observes
that the taste for retirement, reading, and contemplation, promotes
the true relish for select company, and says,

"Thus I remove at pleasure, as I grow weary of the country or the
town, as I avoid a crowd or seek company.--Here, then, let me have
_books and bread_ enough without dependence; a bottle of hermitage and
a plate of olives for a select friend; with an early rose to present a
young lady as an emblem of discretion no less than of beauty."

At Oxford appeared that predilection for paradoxes and over-curious
speculations, which formed afterwards the marking feature of his
literary character. He has been unjustly contemned as a sciolist; he
was the correspondent of Leibnitz, Le Clerc, and Bayle, and was a
learned author when scarcely a man. He first published a Dissert