of Paine, sharpening their weapons on those of the more scholarly
French deists. A Life of Jesus, including his Apocryphal History,
[1677] was published in 1818, with such astute avoidance of all
comment that it escaped prosecution. Others, taking a more daring
course, fared accordingly. George Houston translated the Ecce Homo of
d'Holbach, first publishing it at Edinburgh in 1799, and reprinting it
in London in 1813. For the second issue he was prosecuted, fined £200,
and imprisoned for two years in Newgate. Robert Wedderburn, a mulatto
calling himself "the Rev.," in reality a superannuated journeyman
tailor who officiated in Hopkins Street Unitarian Chapel, London, was
in 1820 sentenced to two years' imprisonment in Dorchester Jail for a
"blasphemous libel" contained in one of his pulpit discourses. His
Letters to the Rev. Solomon Herschell (the Jewish Chief Rabbi) and to
the Archbishop of Canterbury show a happy vein of orderly irony and
not a little learning, despite his profession of apostolic ignorance;
and at the trial the judge admitted his defence to be "exceedingly
well drawn up." His publications naturally received a new impetus,
and passed to a more drastic order of mockery.