the author's opinions are set forth, it is true, in a most offensive and
irreverent style. As Dr. Hopkins wrote of Ethan Allen,--

"One hand was clenched to batter noses,
While t'other scrawled 'gainst Paul and Moses."

But who reads it now? On the other hand, no one who has studied Paine's
career can deny his honesty and his disinterestedness; and every
unprejudiced reader of his works must admit not merely his great ability
in urging his opinions, but that he sincerely believed all he wrote. Let
us, then, try to forget the carbuncled nose, the snuffy waistcoat, the
unorthodox sneer. We should wipe out his later years, cut his life short
at 1796, and take Paine when he wrote "Common Sense," Paine when he
lounged at the White Bear in Piccadilly, talking over with Horne Tooke
the answer to Mr. Burke's "Reflections," and Paine, when, as "foreign
benefactor of the species," he took his seat in the famous French
Convention.

It would repay some capable author to dig him up, wash him, and show him
to the world as he was. A biography of him would embrace the history of
the struggle which established the new theory of politics in government.
He is the representative man of Democracy in both hemispheres,--a good
subject in the hands of a competent artist; and the time has arrived, we
think, when justice may be done him. As a general rule, it is yet too
soon to write the History of the United States since 1784. Half a
century has not been sufficient to wear out the bitter feeling excited
by the long struggle of Democrats and Federalists. Respectable
gentlemen, who, more pious than Aeneas, have undertaken to carry their
grandfathers' remains from the ruins of the past into the present era,
seem to be possessed with the same demon of discord that agitated the