or pamphlet. Among a vulgar and forgotten crowd of declaimers, the
harebrained Lord Stanhope, Mary Wolstonecraft, who afterward wrote a
"Vindication of the Rights of Women," and the violent Catharine
Macaulay came forward to enter the ring against the great Mr. Burke.
Dr. Priestley, Unitarian divine, discoverer of oxygen gas,
correspondent of Dr. Franklin, afterward mobbed in Birmingham, and
self-exiled to Pennsylvania, fiercely backed Dr. Price, and maintained
that the French Revolution would result "in the enlargement of liberty,
the melioration of society, and the increase of virtue and happiness."
The "Vindiciae Gallicae" brought into notice Mr. Mackintosh, an
opponent whom Burke did not consider beneath him. But the champion was
Thomas Paine. At the White Bear, Piccadilly, Paine's favorite lounge,
where Romney, who painted a good portrait of him, Lord Edward
Fitzgerald, Colonel Oswald, Horne Tooke, and others of that set of
clever, impracticable reformers used to meet, there had been talk of
the blow Mr. Burke was preparing to strike, and Paine had promised his
friends to ward it off and to return it. He set himself to work in the
Red-Lion Tavern, at Islington, and in three months, Part the First of
the "Rights of Man" was ready for the press. Here a delay occurred. The
printer who had undertaken the job came to a stop before certain
treasonable passages, and declined proceeding farther. This caused the
loss of a month. At last, Jordan, of Fleet Street, brought it out on
the 13th of March, 1791. No publication in Great Britain, not Junius
nor Wilkes's No. 45, had produced such an effect. All England was
divided into those who, like Cruger of Bristol, said "Ditto to Mr.
Burke," and those who swore by Thomas Paine. "It is a false, wicked,
and seditious libel," shouted loyal gentlemen. "It abounds in
unanswerable truths, and principles of the purest morality and
benevolence; it has no object in view but the happiness of mankind,"
answered the reformers. "He is the scavenger of rebellion and