Inquisition adapted to North America,--a Protestant _auto da fé_. The
victim lay helpless before his persecutors; the agonies of disease
supplied the place of rack and fagot. But nothing like a recantation
could be wrung from him. And so his tormentors left him alone to die,
and his freethinking smiths and cobblers rejoiced over his fidelity to
the cause.

He was buried on his farm at New Rochelle, according to his latest
wishes. "Thomas Paine. Author of 'Common Sense,'" the epitaph he had
fixed upon, was carved upon his tomb. A better one exists from an
unknown hand, which tells, in a jesting way, the secret of the sorrows
of his later life:--

"Here lies Tom Paine, who wrote in liberty's defence,
And in his 'Age of Reason' lost his 'Common Sense.'"

Ten years after, William Cobbett, who had left England in a fit of
political disgust and had settled himself on Long Island to raise
hogs and ruta-bagas, resolved to go home again. Cobbett had become an
admirer, almost a disciple of Paine. The "Constitution-grinder" of '96
was now "a truly great man, a truly philosophical politician, a mind as
far superior to Pitt and Burke as the light of a flambeau is superior to
that of a rush-light." Above all, Paine had been Cobbett's teacher on
financial questions. In 1803, Cobbett read his "Decline and Fall of the
English System," and then "saw the whole matter in its true light; and
neither pamphleteers nor speech-makers were after that able to raise a
momentary puzzle in his mind." Perhaps Cobbett thought he might excite a
sensation in England and rally about him the followers of Paine, or it
may be that he wished to repair the gross injustice he had done him by
some open act of adherence; at all events, he exhumed Paine's body and