CARLILE, RICHARD

A printer and bookseller of London, who in 1819 was fined and imprisoned for the publication of Paine's Age of Reason, and Palmer's Light of Nature.

He also wrote and published several pretended expositions of Freemasonry, which, after his death, were collected, in 1845, in one volume, under the title of a Manual of Freemasonry, in three parts.

Carlile was a professed atheist, and, although a fanatical reformer of what he supposed to be the errors of the age, was a man of some ability.

His Masonic works are interspersed with considerable learning, and are not as abusive of the Order as expositions generally are. He was born in 1790, and died in 1843, in London. For ten years before his death his religious opinions had been greatly modified.