aking acquaintance with Thomas
Paine, and can give no good reason for their dislike of him.

And it is not easy for the general reader to become intimate with him.
He will find him, of course, in Biographical Dictionaries, Directories
of the City of the Great Dead, which only tell you where men lived, and
what they did to deserve a place in the volume; but as to a life of him,
strictly speaking, there is none. Oldys and Cobbett tried to flay him
alive in pamphlets; Sherwin and Clio Rickman were prejudiced friends and
published only panegyrics. All are out of print and difficult to find.
Cheetham's work is a political libel; and the attempt of Mr. Vail of
the "Beacon" to canonize him in the "Infidel's Calendar," cannot be
recommended to intelligent persons. We might expect to meet with him in
those books of lives so common with us,--collections in which a certain
number of deceased gentlemen are bound up together, so resembling each
other in feature that one might suppose the narratives ground out by
some obituary-machine and labelled afterward to suit purchasers. Even
this "sign-post biography," as the "Quarterly" calls it, Paine has
escaped. He was not a marketable commodity. There was no demand for him
in polite circles. The implacable hand of outraged orthodoxy was against
him. Hence his memory has lain in the gutter. Even his friend Joel
Barlow left him out of the "Columbiad," to the great disgust of Clio
Rickman, who thought his name should have appeared in the Fifth Book
between Washington and Franklin. Surely Barlow might have found room for
him in the following "Epic List of Heroes":--

"Wythe, Mason, Pendleton, with Henry joined,
Rush, Rodney, Langdon, friends of humankind,
Persuasive Dickinson, the farmer's boast,
Recording Thompson, pride of all the host,
Nash, Jay, the Livingstons, in council great,
Rutledge and Laurens, held the rolls of fate."

But no! Neither author nor authorling liked to have his name seen in
company with Thomas Paine. And when a curious compiler has taken him up,
he has held him at arm's length, and, after eyeing him cautiously, has
dropped him like some unclean and noxious animal.

Sixty years ago, Paine's friends used to say, that, "in spite of some
indiscreet writings on the subject of religion," he deserved the respect
and thanks of Americans for his services. We think that he deserves
something more at the present day than this absolute neglect. There is
stuff eno