sgill's debts caused
him apparently to spend the rest of his days in the comparative
peace of the Fleet prison.

Coleridge says there is no genuine Saxon English better than
Asgill's, and that his irony is often finer than Swift's. At all
events, his burnt work--the labour of seven years--is very dreary
reading, relieved however by such occasional good sayings as "It
is much easier to make a creed than to believe it after it is
made," or "Custom itself, without a reason for it, is an argument
only for fools." Asgill's defence before the House of Commons
shows that a very strained interpretation was placed upon the
passages that gave offence. Let it suffice to quote one: "Stare
at me as long as you will, I am sure that neither my physiognomy,
sins, nor misfortune can make me so unlikely to be translated as
my Redeemer was to be hanged." Asgill clearly wrote in all
honesty and sincerity, though the contrary has been suggested;
and his defence was not without spirit or point: "Pray what is
this blasphemous crime I here stand charged with? A belief of
what we all profess, or at least of what no one can deny. If the
death of the body be included in the fall, why is not this life
of the body included in the redemption? And if I have a firmer
belief in this than another, am I therefore a blasphemer?" But
the House thought that he was; and to impugn the right of the
majority to decide such a point would be to impugn a fundamental
principle of the British Constitution. I therefore refrain from
an opinion, and leave the matter to the reader's judgment.

Among the many books that have owed an increase of popularity, or
any popularity at all, to the fire that burnt them, may be
instanced the two works of Dr. Coward, which were burnt by order
of the House of Commons in Palace Yard on March 18th, 1704. Dr.
Coward had been a Fellow of Merton, and he wrote poetry as well
as books of medicine, but in 1702 he ventured on metaphysical
ground, and under the pseudonym of "Estibius Psychalethes"
dedicated to the clergy his _Second Thoughts concerning the
Human Soul_, in which he contended that the notion of the soul as
a separate immaterial substance was "a plain heathenist
invention:" not exactly a position the clergy were likely to
welcome, although the author repeatedly avowed his belief in an
eternal future life. In 1704 the Doctor published his _Grand
Essay: a Vindication of Reason and Religion against the
Impostures of Philosophy_