onnects him with the exemplary sect of the Friends.
He received his education at the Grammar School of his native place,
Thetford, in Norfolk, but attained to little beyond the rudiments of
Latin. His first application to business was in the trade of his father,
that of staymaker, which he followed in London, Dover, and Sandwich,
where he married; afterwards he became a grocer and an exciseman, at
Lewes, in Sussex. This situation he lost through some misdemeanor. After
this, however, so well were the public authorities of his native country
disposed to serve him, that one of the Commissioners of Excise gave him
a letter of recommendation to Dr. Franklin, then a colonial agent in
London, who recommended him to go to America. At this period he had
first exercised his talents as a writer by drawing up a pamphlet
recommending the advance of the salaries of excisemen.

"His age at this time was thirty-seven. His first engagement in
Philadelphia was with Mr. Aitkin, a respectable bookseller, who, in
January, 1775, commenced the 'Pennsylvania Magazine,' the editorship of
which work became the business of Mr. Paine, who had a salary of L50
currency a year. When Dr. Rush, of Philadelphia, suggested to Paine the
propriety of preparing the Americans for a separation from England, it
seems that he seized with avidity the idea, and immediately commenced
his famous pamphlet on that subject, which being shown in MS. to Doctors
Franklin and Rush and Mr. Samuel Adams, was, after some discussion,
entitled, at the suggestion of Dr. Rush, 'Common Sense.' For this
production the Legislature of Pennsylvania voted him L500. Shortly
afterwards Paine was appointed Secretary to the Committee of the United
States on Foreign Affairs. His business was merely to copy papers,
number and file them, and generally do the duty of what is now called a
clerk in the Foreign Department. But in the title-page of his 'Rights of
Man,' he styles himself 'Secretary for Foreign Affairs to the Congress
of the United States in the Late War.' While in this office, he
published a series of appeals on the struggle between Great Britain and
the colonies. In 1777 he was obliged to resign his secretaryship on
account of a quarrel with Silas Deane, American agent in France. The
next year, however, he obtained the appointment of Clerk to the Assembly
of Pennsylvania; and in 1785, on the rejection of a motion to appoint
him historiographer to the United States, the Congress g