Note 5 — Chapter XXIII · “WHATEVER OTHER FAULTS I MAY HAVE, THAT OF LETTING GO MY HOLD IS NOT ONE.”

Mr. Paine has been variously described as a traitor, an apostate, a seducer, an infidel, a rogue, an outcast, and—“one of the most enlightened and benevolent men that ever lived.” The reconciling of these things must be left to his biographer; meanwhile, the following facts are all that are necessary to be at present noted:—Paine had been an exciseman, and discovered that he could write by the production of an eloquent pamphlet upon some grievance of the excise-officers. He had written poems, and enjoyed the friendship of Oliver Goldsmith. Being introduced to Dr. Franklin, he was induced to visit Philadelphia; and there he wrote a pamphlet under the title of “Common Sense,” which is generally asserted to have been a leading factor in producing the Declaration of Independence, being read and reprinted by hundreds of thousands. Honours came upon him; he was made Secretary to Congress for Foreign Affairs, and remained in America some dozen years. At the outbreak of the French Revolution, Paine was in London again, enjoying the friendship of Edmund Burke, whom, from the part the latter took concerning the American Revolution, Paine “naturally considered a friend to mankind.” Mr. Burke’s celebrated “Reflections on the Revolution in France” was, however, the means of sundering this friendship; and the tract was answered by Paine in “The Rights of Man,” a pamphlet which produced even more delight among the advanced liberals of the day than Burke’s had with the terrified aristocracy. The “answer” to Paine was his “Life,” “by Francis Oldys, A.M.” (one of the most horrible collections of abuse which even that venal day produced), written by George Chalmers, a Government clerk and pamphleteer, who, by the way, did much better work as an antiquarian and historical compiler. A second part of “The Rights of Man” followed this, and a Government prosecution succeeded that. A verdict of guilty, however, found the culprit a Member of the French National Convention; for no less than four constituencies had elected him, on his reputation alone. He sat for Calais; was near losing his head, for his vote on the side of humanity, when Louis XVI. was arraigned; wrote “The Age of Reason” in prison; eventually returned to America, and died (1809) in his seventy-third year, at his farm at New Rochelle, Long Island; which farm had been the gift of the nation about a quarter of a century previously.