To dress the vines new labour is required, Nor must the painful husbandman be tired. Id. Interpose, on pain of my displeasure, Betwixt their swords. Id. Don Sebastian.

If philosophy be uncertain, the former will conclude it vain; and the latter may be in danger of pronouncing the same on their pains, who seek it, if after all their labour they must reap the wind, mere opinion and conjecture. Glanville.

Excess of cold, as well as heat, pains us, because it is equally destructive to that temper which is necessary to the preservation of life.

Locke.

No custom can make the painfulness of a debauch easy or pleasing to a man; since nothing can be pleasant that is unnatural.

South.

Pleasure arose in those very parts of his leg, that Just before had been so much pained by the fetter. Addison.

Id.

None shall presume to fly under pain of death, with wings of any other man's making. Evils have been more painful to us in the prospect, than by their actual pressure.

I'll prove a true painstaker day and night, I'll spin and card, and keep our children tight.

It bid her feel

Id.

Gay.

PAINE (Thomas), a celebrated deist and political demagogue of the American and French Revolutions, was born at Thetford, in Norfolk, in 1737, where his father carried on the business of a staymaker. All sects have had their disgraceful members and offspring. Paine's father, a peaceful and industrious Quaker, connects him with the exemplary sect of the Friends. He received his education at the grammar-school of his native place, but attained to little beyond the rudiments of Latin; but he seems to have paid considerable attention to arithmetic, and to have evinced an early predilection for the mathematics. His first application to business was in the trade of his father, which he followed in London, Dover, and Sandwich, where he married. Afterwards he became a grocer and excise-, man at Lewes in Sussex. This situation he lost for some misdemeanor, but was subsequently restored on petition, until finally dismissed for keeping a tobacconist's shop, which was thought to interfere with his official duties. After this, however, so well were the public authorities of his native country disposed to serve him, that one of the commissioners of excise gave him a letter of recommendation to Dr. Franklin, then a colonial agent in London, who recommended him to go to America. At this period VOL. XVI.

he had first exercised his talents as a writer, by drawing up a pamphlet, recommending the advance of the salaries of excisemen.

His age at this time was thirty-seven. His Aitkin, a respectable bookseller, who, in Janufirst engagement in Philadelphia was with Mr. ary 1775, commenced the Pennsylvania Magazine, the editorship of which work became the business of Mr. Paine, for which he had a salary of £50 currency a year. According to Mr. Cheetham, this work was well supported by him, and it was here that he published his song upon general Wolfe, which by his biographer is called beautiful; but taste either in prose or poetry does not appear to us to be among Mr. Cheetham's biographical qualifications.- When the propriety of preparing the Americans for a Dr. Rush of Philadelphia suggested to Paine separation from Great Britain, it seems that he seized with avidity the idea, and immediately commenced his famous pamphlet on that measure, which being shown in MS. to Drs. Franklin and Rush, and Mr. S. Adams, was, after some discussion, entitled, at the suggestion of Dr. Rush, Common Sense.

For this production the legislation of Pennsylvania voted him £500.; he also received the degree of M. A. from the university of the same province, and was chosen a member of the literary honors were communicated in a tongue American Philosophical Society. We hope the which he could read; as his mortal aversion to learned languages is well known. To these rewards was soon afterwards added the office of clerk to the committee for foreign affairs, which, although a confidential situation, scarcely justified him, says one of his friendly biographers, in assuming the title of late secretary for foreign affairs,' which he did in the title-page of the Rights of Man.

'Bitterly,' says Mr. Cheetham, as he pretended to be opposed to titles, when grasping the pillars of the British government he endeavoured to subvert it, he was yet so fond of them, in reality, that he not only assumed to himself a title to which he had no claim, but he seems to have gloried in the fraudulent assumption. In his title-page of his Rights of Man, he styles himself Secretary for Foreign Affairs to the congress of the United States, in the late war.' The foreign affairs of the United States were conducted by a committee, or board, of which he was secretary, or clerk; clerk more properly, at a very low salary. His business was merely to copy papers, number and file them, and, generally, to do the duty of what is now called a clerk in the foreign department; he was, however, determined to give himself a higher title. Unsubstantial in essence as superadditions to names are, he nevertheless liked them, and seemed to be aware that, universally, they possess a charm to which he was by no means insensible. From this, and many other circumstances, we may infer that his objections to being himself a lord of the bedchamber, or a groom of the stole, a master of the hounds, or a gentleman in waiting, would not have been stronger than were his wishes to be retained in the excise.' While in this office, he published a series of

2 F

appeals on the nature of the pending struggle between the colonies and Great Britain, which he denominated the Crisis. In 1779 he was obliged to resign his secretaryship, owing to a controversy with Mr. Silas Deane, whom he detected in a fraudulent attempt to profit by conveying the secret supplies of warlike stores from France. Paine divulged the real state of the case, which was deemed an injurious breach of trust, and one which might alienate the French court from its creditable services to the new republic. The next year, however, he obtained the subordinate appointment of clerk to the assembly of Pennsylvania; and in 1785, on the rejection of a motion to appoint him historiographer to the United States, received from congress a donation of 3000 dollars, and 500 acres of highly cultivated land from the state of New York. In 1787 he embarked for France, with a letter of recommendation from Dr. Franklin to the Duke de la Rochefoucault, in which he calls him an ingenious honest man, the author of a famous piece entitled Common Sense.' From Paris he returned to England, with a view to the prose cution of a project relative to the erection of an iron bridge, of his invention, at Rotherham, in Yorkshire, and which was in fact the first bridge of this kind suggested in modern times. See IRON BRIDGES. In the course of the following year he was arrested for debt, when he was bailed by some American merchants, and went to Paris in 1791 to publish, under the name of Achilles Duchatellet, a tract recommending the abolition of royalty. On returning to this country, he wrote the first part of his Rights of Man, in answer to Mr. Burke's Reflections on the French Revolution. The second part was published early in 1792; and, on the 21st of May that year, a proclamation was issued against wicked and seditious publications, alluding to, but not naming, our author's productions. On the same day the attorney-general commenced a prosecution against him.

On these circumstances his American biographe remarks:-Whatever party and passion, prejudice and malignity, ignorance and injustice, may roundly assert, Paine experienced from the British government a mildness, a forbearance, which no man urging amongst us, in the boldest language of sedition, a dissolution of the union, a destruction of the national government, and a consequent civil war, could expect from the government of the United States. The first part of the Rights of Man, not a jot less intemperate and rebellious than the second, was published not only with impunity, but without notice from the government. I do not mention the fact in commendation; Paine ought to have been punished. Alarm, if the government was alarmed, was a poor apology. When did fear beget respect? When did imbecility avert danger?' (p. 124.)

The king's proclamation was an act of graciousness. The work was clearly seditious in the malice of intention, as well as in the criminality of object. As thousands of persons besides the booksellers had industriously published it, the law, if the administrators of it had been vindictively inclined, had full scope for operation. The proclamation notified to the kingdom

the diabolical intentions of the author, the tendency of his demoralising work, and the penalties which all publishers of it incurred of those admirable laws, not which were made for the case, but of those ancient and free laws which the United States have adopted for the government of the press. It was therefore preventive, not retributive justice.' (p. 156.)

We continue our memoir, in the language of Mr. Cheetham, to the close of his connexion with this country: Loyal associations now sprung up to counteract the revolutionary efforts of the revolution clubs. Passion met passion, until, in the struggle, on the one side for a dissolution of the government, on the other for its existence, the nation became more and more agitated. In this state of things, Paine published, about August 1792, his Address to the Addressors. This is a miserable lampoon on the orators in parliament who had spoken on the side of the king's proclamation, as well as on those placemen into whose offices Paine would willingly have crept, before he left England, in the year 1774. He states that a prosecution had been commenced against him; declares the incompetency of a jury to decide on work so recondite and important as the Rights of Man; talks quite philosophically upon the propriety of taking the sense of the nation upon it, by polling each man; pronounces the laws in relation to the press as fundamentally bad, the administration of them by the courts as notoriously corrupt, and denies that the Rights of Man is seditious, for that it contains a plan for augmenting the pay of the soldiers, and meliorating the condition of the poor!" While he was preparing this stuff for the press, he published letters to the chairmen of several of the meetings, which were convened to compliment the king on his proclamation. He was now evidently awed by the vigor of the government, and the pariotic spirit of the nation. All over England he was carried about in effigy, with a pair of stays under his arm; and the populace, staymakers and all, alternately laughed and swore at the impudent attempts of a staymaker to destroy their government. His trial was to come on in the following December. Whilst he foresaw, and no doubt dreaded, the imprisonment which awaited him, a French deputation announced to him in London, in the preceding September, that the department of Calais had elected him a member of the national convention. This was doubly grateful, grateful in the escape which it afforded him from a just punishment, without the imputation of cowardice; grateful in the honor which bloody anarchists had conferred upon him by electing him a member of their order. Without delay he proceeded to Dover, where a custom-house officer examined his baggage, and finally let him pass. He had not, however, sailed from Dover for Calais more than twenty minutes, when an order was received from the government to detain him. He states his detention and examination at Dover, in a letter to Mr. Dundas, dated Calais, September 15th, 1792.' (p. 160.)

He arrived in this month at Paris and was an advocate in the convention for the trial of Louis XVI.; but he voted against the sentence of

death passed on him, proposing his imprisonment during the war, and his subsequent banishnent. This conduct, however, offended the Jacobins, and, towards the close of 1793, he was excluded from the convention on the ground of his being a foreigner (though he had been naturalised), arrested, and committed to the prison of the Luxembourg. Just before his confinement he had finished the first part of his Age of Reason, being an investigation of true and fabulous theology; and, having confided it to the care of his friend Joel Barlow, it was published. He was now taken ill, to which circumstance he ascribes his escape from the guillotine; and on the fall of Robespierre was released. In 1795 he published, at Paris, the second part of his Age of Reason, and in May, 1796 addressed to the Council of Five Hundred, The Decline and Fall of the System of Finance in England; and published his pamphlet entitled Agrarian Justice. He remained in France till August, 1802, when he embarked for America. Paine had at this time lost his wife (the year following his marriage), and, after a cohabitation of three years and a half, had separated from a second several years before by mutual consent.

Among his other lucubrations in France we find the following sage eulogy on the number fixed upon to constitute the directory: After preferring a plural to an individual executive, the next question is,' he observes, 'What shall be the number of the plurality?' And here we request the grave attention of some of our most accurate calculators of the class of reformists.

'Three are too few, either for the variety or the quantity of business. The constitution has ⚫ adopted five, and experience has shown that this number of directors is sufficient for all the purposes, and therefore a greater number would only be an unnecessary expense. The number which France had hit upon (and which I agree with him,' says Mr. Cheetham, is quite sufficient), he seems to think, designed by nature for all governments, although human wisdom, in no part of the world, except in France, has as yet adopted it. Nature,' he says, 'has given us exactly five senses, and the same number of fingers and toes; pointing out to us, by this kindness, the propriety of an executive directory of five, precisely as in France. If one sense,' he continues, had been sufficient, she would have given us no more; an individual executive,' he therefore infers, 'is unnatural and unphilosophical, individuality being exploded by nature. Surely tyranny never had a more fawning parasite, freedom a more decided enemy, p. 219.

6

This writer, supposing him (Paine) to be a gentleman,' was employed to engage a room for him at Lovett's hotel, New York. On his arrival' (in 1802), he says, about ten at night he wrote me a note desiring to see me immediately. I waited on him at Lovett's, in company with Mr. George Clinton, jun. We rapped at the door; a small figure opened it within, meanly dressed, having on an old top coat, without an under one; a dirty silk handkerchief loosely thrown round his neck; a long beard of more than a week's growth; a face well carbuncled,

fiery as the setting sun, and the whole figure staggering under a load of inebriation. I was on the point of enquiring for Mr. Paine, when I saw in his countenance something of the portraits I had seen of him. We were desired to be seated. He had before him a small round table, on which were a beef-steak, some beer, a pint of brandy, a pitcher of water, and a glass. He sat eating, drinking, and talking, with as much composure as if he had lived with us all his life. I soon perceived that he had a very retentive memory, and was full of anecdote. The bishop of Landaff was almost the first word he uttered, and it was followed by informing us that he had in his trunk a manuscript reply to the bishop's Apology. He then, calmly mumbling his steak, and ever and anon drinking his brandy and beer, repeated the introduction to his reply, which occupied him nearly half an hour. This was done with deliberation, the utmost clearness, and a perfect apprehension, intoxicated as he was, of all that he repeated. Scarcely a word would he allow us to speak. He always, I afterwards found, in all companies, drunk or sober, would be listened to: in this regard there were no rights of men with him, no equality, no reciprocal immunities and obligations, for he would listen to no one.'

On the 13th of October 1802 he arrived at Baltimore, under the protection of Mr. Jefferson. But it appears that curiosity induced nobody of distinction to suffer his approach. While at his hotel he was principally visited by the lower class of emigrants from England, Scotland, and Ireland, who had there admired his Rights of Man. With them it appears he drank grog in the tap-room morning, noon, and night, admired and praised, strutting and staggering about, showing himself to all, and shaking hands with all. The leaders of the party to which he had attached himself paid him no attention.' He had brought to America with him a woman, named Madame Bonneville, whom he had seduced away from her husband, with her two sons; and whom he seems to have treated with the utmost meanness and tyranny. Mr. Cheetham gives the following account of his manner of living at this time :

In the spring of 1804 he returned to his farm at New Rochelle, Purdy having left it, taking with him the two Bonnevilles, and leaving their mother in the city. Not chosing to live upon the farm himself, he hired one Christopher Derick, an old man, to work it for him. While Derick was husbanding the farm, Paine and the two young Bonnevilles boarded sometimes with Mr. Wilburn, in Gold-street, in the city, but principally with Mr. Andrew Dean, at New Rochelle. Mrs. Dean, with whom I have conversed, tells me that he was daily drunk at their house, and that in his few sober moments he was always quarrelling with her, and disturbing the peace of the family. She represents him as deliberately and disgustingly filthy. It is not surprising, therefore, that she importuned her husband to turn him out of the house; but owing to Mr. Dean's predilection for his political writings, her importunities were, for several weeks, unavailing. Constant domestic disquiet very

naturally ensued, which was increased by Paine's peevishness and violence. One day he ran after Miss Dean, a girl of fifteen, with a chair whip in his hand, to whip her, and would have done so but for the interposition of her mother. The enraged Mrs. Dean, to use her own language, 'flew at him.' Paine retreated up stairs into his private room, and was swiftly pursued by his antagonist. The little drunken old man owed his safety to the bolts of his door. In the fall of the year Mrs. Dean prevailed with her husband to keep him in the house no longer. The two Bonnevilles were quite neglected. From Dean's he went to live on his farm. Here one of his first acts was to discharge old Derick, with whom he had wrangled, and to whom he had been a tyrant from the moment of their engagement. Derick left him with revengeful thoughts. 'Being now alone, except in the company of the two Bonnevilles, of whom he took but little notice, he engaged an old black woman of the name of Betty to do his housework. Betty lived with him but three weeks. She seems to have been as intemperate as himself. Like her master she was every day intoxicated. Paine would accuse her of stealing his New England rum, and Betty would retort by calling him an old drunkard. Often, Mrs. Dean informs me, would they both lie prostrate on the same floor, dead-drunk, sprawling and swearing and threatening to fight, but incapable of approaching each other to combat. Nothing but inability prevented a battle.' p. 241.

We must not withhold from our readers part of a letter written to Paine from an illiterate brother democrat and infidel, after a sordid quarrel which had taken place between them :"From the first time I saw you in this country, to the last time of your departure from my house, my conscience bears me testimony that I treated you as a friend and a brother, without any hope of extra rewards, only the payment of my just demand. I often told many of my friends, had you come to this country without one cent. of property, then, as long as I had one shilling, you should have a part. I declare when I first saw you here I knew nothing of your possessions, or that you were worth £400 per year, sterling. I, Sir, am not like yourself. I do not bow down to a little paltry gold at the sacrifice of just principles. I, Sir, am poor, with an independent mind, which perhaps renders me more comfort than your independent fortune renders you. You tell me further that I shall be excluded from any thing, and every thing, contained in your will. All this I totally disregard. I believe, if it was in your power, you would go further, and say you would prevent my obtaining the just and lawful debt that you contracted with me; for when a man is vile enough to deny a debt, he is not honest enough to pay without being compelled. I have lived fifty years on the bounty and good providence of my Creator, and I do not doubt the goodness of his will concerning me. I likewise have to inform you that I totally disregard the powers of your mind and pen; for should you, by your conduct, permit this letter to appear in public, in vain may you attempt to print or publish any thing afterwards. Do look back to my

past conduct respecting you, and try if you cannot raise one grain of gratitude in your heart towards me for all the kind acts of benevolence I bestowed on you. I showed your letter, at the time I received it, to an intelligent friend; he said it was a characteristic of the vileness of your natural disposition, and enough to damn the reputation of any man. You tell me that I should have come to you, and not written the letter. I did so three times; and the last you gave me the ten dollars, and told me you were going to have a stove in a separate room, and then you would pay me. One month had passed and I wanted the money, but still found you with the family that you resided with; and delicacy prevented me to ask you for pay of board and lodging; you never told me to fetch the account, as you say you did. When I called the last time but one, you told me to come or the Sunday following, and you would pay or settle with me; I came according to order, but found you particularly engaged with the French woman and her two boys, &c.

You frequently boast of what you have done for the woman above alluded to; that she and her family have cost you 2000 dollars; and since you came the last time to York you have been bountiful to her, and given her 100 dollars per time. This may be all right. She may have rendered you former and present secret services, such as are not in my power to perform; but at the same time I think it would be just in you to pay your debts. I know that the poor black woman, at New Rochelle, that you hired as a servant, and I believe paid every attention to you in her power, had to sue you for her wages before you would pay her, and Mr. Shute had to become security for you.

A respectable gentleman from New Rochelle called to see me a few days past, and said that every body was tired of you there, and no one would undertake to board and lodge you. I thought this was the case, as I found you at a tavern, in a most miserable situation. You appeared as if you had not been shaved for a fortnight, and as to a shirt it could not be said that you had one on; it was only the remains of one, and this likewise appeared not to have been off your back for a fortnight, and was nearly the color of tanned leather, and you had the most disagreeable smell possible; just like that of our poor beggars in England. Do you not recollect the pains I took to clean and wash you? That I got a tub of warm water and soap, and washed from head to foot, and this I had to do three times before I could get you clean. I likewise shaved you and cut your nails, that were like birds' claws. I remember a remark that I made to you at that time, which was, that you put me in mind of Nebuchadnezzar, who was said to be in this situation. Many of your toenails exceeded half an inch in length, and others had grown round your toes, and nearly as far under as they extended on the top. forgotten the pains I took with you when you lay sick wallowing in your own filth? I remember that I got Mr. Hooton (a friend of mine, and whom I believe to be one of the best hearted men in the world) to assist me in removing and

Have you

cleaning you. He told me he wondered how I could no it; for his part he would not like to do the same again for ten dollars. I told him you were a fellow being, and that it was our duty to assist each other in distress. Have you forgotten my care of you during the winter you staid with me? How I put you in bed every night, with a warm brick to your feet, and treated you like an infant one month old? Have you forgotten likewise how you destroyed my bed and bedding by fire, and also a great coat that was worth ten dollars?

"I remember, during one of your stays at my house, you were sued in the justice's court by a poor man, for the board and lodging of the French woman, to the amount of about thirty dollars; but as the man had no proof, and only depended on your word, he was non-suited, and a cost of forty-two shillings thrown upon him. This highly gratified your unfeeling heart. I believe you had promised payment, as you said you would give the French woman the money to go and pay it with. I know it is customary in England that when any gentleman keeps a lady, that he pays her board and lodging. You com plain that you suffered with the cold, and that there ought to have been a fire in the parlour. But the fact is, that I expended so much money on your account, and received so little, that I could not go to any further expense, and if I had I should not have got you away. A friend of yours that knew my situation told you that you ought to buy a load of wood to burn in the parlour; your answer was that you should not stay above a week or two, and did not want to have the wood to remove; this certainly would have been a hard case for you to have left me a few sticks of wood.

Now, Sir, I think I have drawn a complete portrait of your character; yet to enter upon every minutia would be to give a history of your life, and to develop the fallacious mask of hypocrisy and deception under which you have acted in your political as well as moral capacity of life. There may be many grammatical errors in this letter. To you I have no apologies to make; but I hope the candid and impartial public will not view them with a critic's eye.' WILLIAM CARVER.'

⚫ Thomas Paine, New York, Dec. 2, 1806.'

'He lived at Ryder's until 4th of May, 1809, about eleven months; during which time, except the last ten weeks, he got drunk regularly twice a day. As to his person, said Mr. Ryder, we had to wash him like a child, and with much the same coaxing; for he hated soap and water. He would have the best of meat cooked for him, eat a little of it, and throw away the rest, that he might have the worth of the money which he paid for his board. He chose to perform all the functions of nature in bed.-When censured for it he would say, I pay you money enough, and you shall labor for it.'

'He returned,' says Mr. Cheetham, to his farm at New Rochelle, taking with him Madame Bonneville and her sons. On his arrival he hired Rachel Gidney, a black woman, to cook for him. Rachel continued with him about two

months. But as he never thought of paying for services, or for meat, or for any thing else, Rachel had to sue him for five dollars, the amount of her wages. She got out a warrant, on which he was apprehended, and Mr. Shute, one of his neighbours and political admirers, was his bail. The wages were finally obtained, but he thought it hard that he should be sued in a country for which he had done so much!'

It is now time to bring this article to a close. We will conclude it with a passage from a letter written by Dr. Manley, who attended this extraordinary person in his last illness, in answer to enquiries from Mr. Cheetham :

During the latter part of his life, though his conversation was equivocal, his conduct was singular. He would not be left alone night or day. He not only required to have some person with him, but he must see that he or she was there, and would not allow his curtain to be closed at any time; and if, as it would sometimes unavoidably happen, he was left alone, he would scream and holla until some person came to him. When relief from pain would admit, he seemed thoughtful and contemplative, his eyes being generally closed, and his hands folded. d.upon his breast, although he never slept without the assistance of an anodyne. There was something remarkable in his conduct about this period (which comprises about two weeks immediately preceding his death), particularly when we reflect that Thomas Paine was author of the Age of Reason. He would call out during his paroxysms of distress, without intermission, O Lord help me, God help me, Jesus Christ help me, O Lord help me,' &c., repeating the same expression without any the least variation, in a tone of voice that would alarm the house. It was this conduct which induced me to think that he had abandoned his former opinions; and I was more inclined to that belief when I understood from his nurse (who is a very serious, and, I believe, pious woman) that he would occasionally enquire, when he saw her engaged with a book, what she was reading, and being answered, and at the same time asked whether she should read aloud,* he assented, and would appear to give particular attention.

'I took occasion, during the night of the 5th and 6th of June, to test the strength of his opinions respecting revelation. I purposely made him a very late visit; it was a time which seemed to sort exactly with my errand: it was midnight; he was in great distress, constantly exclaiming in the words above mentioned; when, after a considerable preface, I addressed him in the following manner, the nurse being present :

Mr. Paine, your opinions, by a large portion of the community, have been treated with deference: you have never been in the habit of mixing in your conversation words of course you have never indulged in the practice of profane swearing you must be sensible that we are acquainted with your religious opinions as they are given to the world. What must we think of your present conduct? Why do you call upon Jesus

The book she usually read was Mr. Hobart's Companion for the Altar.