ic servant. He was a bad
gauger for King George, but he was an admirable scribe for a
revolution conducted on constitutional principles.

To follow his history through the war would be tedious. What
Washington and Jefferson really thought of him we shall never know.
He was never mercenary, but his pride was wounded that so little
recognition of his astounding services was forthcoming. The
ingratitude of Kings was a commonplace; the ingratitude of peoples an
unpleasing novelty. But Washington bestirred himself at last, and
Paine was voted an estate of 277 acres, more or less, and a sum of
money. This was in 1784.

Three years afterwards Thomas visited England, where he kept good
company and was very usefully employed engineering, for which
excellent pursuit he would appear to have had great natural aptitude.
Blackfriars Bridge had just tumbled down, and it was Paine's laudable
ambition to build its successor in iron. But the Bastille fell down as
well as Blackfriars Bridge, and was too much for Paine. As Mr. Conway
beautifully puts it: 'But again the Cause arose before him; he must
part from all--patent interests, literary leisure, fine society--and
take the hand of Liberty undowered, but as yet unstained. He must beat
his bridge-iron into a key that shall unlock the British Bastille,
whose walls he sees steadily closing around the people.' 'Miching
mallecho--this means mischief;' and so it proved.

Burke is responsible for the _Rights of Man_. This splendid
sentimentalist published his _Reflections on the Revolution in France_
in November, 1790. Paine immediately sat down in the Angel, Islington,
and began his reply. He was not unqualified to answer Burke; he had
fought a good fight between the years 1775 and 1784. Mr. Conway has
some ground for his epigram, 'where Burke had dabbled, Paine had
dived.' There is nothing in the _Rights of Man_ which would now
frighten, though some of its expressions might still shock, a
lady-in-waiting; but to profess Republicanism in 1791 was no joke, and
the book was proclaimed and Paine prosecuted. Acting upon the advice
of William Blake (the truly sublime), Paine escaped to France, where
he was elected by three departments to a seat in the Convention, and
in that Convention he sat from September, 1792, to December, 1793,
when he was found quarters in the Luxembourg Prison.

This invitation to foreigners to take part in the conduct of the
French Revolution was surely one of the odd