contemporaries who speak of him describe as remarkable. "I will venture
to say that the best thing will be said by Mr. Paine": that was Horne
Tooke's prophecy, talking of some proposed dinner-party.

Demoralized by poverty, with ruined health, his mind had become
distorted by physical suffering and by brooding over the ingratitude
and cruel neglect of the American people, who owed, as he really
believed, their very existence as a nation to him. "Is this what I
ought to have expected from America," he wrote to General Washington,
"after the part I have acted towards her?" "I do not hesitate to say
that you have not served America with more fidelity or greater zeal or
more disinterestedness than myself, and perhaps not with better
effect." Henceforth he was a man of two ideas: he engrafted his
resentment upon his "Rights of Man," and thought himself carrying out
his theory while indulging in his wrath. He poured the full measure of
his indignation upon the party who directed affairs in the United
States, and upon the President. In two long letters, composed after his
release, under Monroe's roof, he accused Washington of conniving at his
imprisonment, to keep him, Paine, "the marplot of all designs against
the people," out of the way. "Mr. Washington and his new-fangled party
were rushing as fast as they dared venture into all the vices and
corruptions of the British government; and it was no more consistent
with the policy of Mr. Washington and those who immediately surrounded
him than it was with that of Robespierre or of Pitt that I should
survive." As he grew more angry, he became more abusive. He ridiculed
Washington's "cold, unmilitary conduct" during the War of Independence,
and accused his administration, since the new constitution, of
"vanity," "ingratitude," "corruption," "bare-faced treachery," and "the
tricks of a sharper." He closed this wretched outbreak of peevishness
and wounded self-conceit with the following passage:--