rational, generous, or social, than that of the wolf or the tiger." The
"New England Palladium" fairly shrieked:--"What! invite to the United
States that lying, drunken, brutal infidel, who rejoices in the
opportunity of basking and wallowing in the confusion, devastation,
bloodshed, rapine, and murder, in which his soul delights?" Why, even
the French called him the English orang-outang! He was exposed with a
monkey and a bear in a cage in Paris. In 1792, he was forbidden to haunt
the White-Bear Tavern in London. He subsisted for eight years on the
charity of booksellers, who employed him in the morning to correct
proofs; in the afternoon he was too drunk. He lodged in a cellar. He
helped the _poissardes_ to clean fish and open oysters. He lived in
misery, filth, and contempt. Not until Livingston went to France did any
respectable American call upon him. Livingston's attentions to him not
only astonished, but disgusted the First Consul, and gave him a very
mean opinion of Livingston's talents. The critical Mr. Dennie caused his
"Portfolio" to give forth this solemn strain: "If, during the present
season of national abasement, infatuation, folly, and vice, any portent
could surprise, sober men would be utterly confounded by an article
current in all our newspapers, that the loathsome Thomas Paine, a
drunken atheist and the scavenger of faction, is invited to return in
a national ship to America by the first magistrate of a free people.
A measure so enormously preposterous we cannot yet believe has been
adopted, and it would demand firmer nerves than those possessed by Mr.
Jefferson to hazard such an insult to the moral sense of the nation. If
that rebel rascal should come to preach from his Bible to our populace,
it would be time for every honest and insulted man of dignity to flee to
some Zoar as from another Sodom, to shake off the very dust of his feet
and to abandon America." "He is coming," wrote Noah Webster, ("the
mender and murderer of English,") "to publish in America the third part
of the 'Age of Reason.'" And the epigrammatists, such as they were,