known and well talked over. William Cobbett, for one, never lost an
opportunity of dressing up Paine as a filthy monster. He wrote his
life for the sake of doing it more thoroughly. The following extract,
probably much relished at the time, will give some idea of the tone and
temper of this performance:--

"How Tom gets a living now, or what brothel he inhabits, I know not, nor
does it much signify. He has done all the mischief he can do in this
world; and whether his carcass is at last to be suffered to rot on
the earth, or to be dried in the air, is of very little consequence.
Whenever or wherever he breathes his last, he will excite neither sorrow
nor compassion; no friendly hand will close his eyes, not a groan will
be uttered, not a tear will be shed. Like Judas, he will be remembered
by posterity; men will learn to express all that is base, malignant,
treacherous, unnatural, and blasphemous by the single monosyllable of
Paine."

Cobbett also wrote an _ante-mortem_ epitaph, a fit inscription for the
life he had composed. It ends thus:--

"He is crammed in a dungeon and preaches up Reason;
Blasphemes the Almighty, lives in filth like a hog;
Is abandoned in death, and interred like a dog."

This brutal passage does not exaggerate the opinion of Paine's character
held by the good people of America. He was an object of horror
to them,--a rebel against government and against God,--a type of
Jacobinism, a type of Infidelity, and, with what seemed to them, no
doubt, a beautiful consistency, a type of all that was abandoned and
vile. Thomas Paine, a Massachusetts poet of _ci-devant_ celebrity,