h, and disease. George Washington did much
for American Independence, but Thomas Paine did perhaps more, for his
writings animated the oppressed Colonists with an enthusiasm for liberty
without which the respectable generalship of Washington might have
been exerted in vain. The first President of the United States was, as
Carlyle grimly says, "no immeasurable man," and we conceive that Paine
had earned the right to criticise even him and his policy.

Every person is of course free to hold what opinion he pleases of
Paine's writings. The _Athenoum_ critic thinks they have "gone the way
of all shams." He is wrong in fact, for they circulate very extensively
still. And he may also be wrong in his literary judgment. William
Hazlitt, whose opinion on any subject connected with literature is at
least as valuable as an _Athenoum_ critic's, ranked Paine very high as
a political writer, and affirmed of his "Rights of Man" that it was "a
powerful and explicit reply to Burke." But Hazlitt had read Paine, which
we suspect many glib critics of to-day have not; for we well remember
how puzzled some of them were to explain whence Shelley took the motto
"We pity the Plumage, but Forget the Dying Bird" prefixed to his Address
to the People on the death of the Princess Charlotte. It was taken, as
they should have known, from one of the finest passages of the "Rights
of Man." Critics, it is well known, sometimes write as Artemus Ward
proposed to lecture on science, "with an imagination untrammeled by the
least knowledge of the subject."

Let us close this vindication of Paine by citing the estimate of him
formed by Walt Whitman, an authority not to be sneered at now even
by _Athenoum_ critics. In 1877 the Liberal League of Philadelphia
celebrated the 140th birthday of Thomas Paine, and a large audience was
gathered by the announcement that Whitman would speak. The great
poet, according to the _Index_ report, after telling how he had become
intimate with some of Paine's friends thirty-five years before, went on
to say:--

"I dare not say how much of what our Union is owning and enjoying
to-day, its independence, its ardent belief in, and substantial practice
of, Radical human rights, and the severance of its Government from all
ecclesiastical and superstitious dominion--I dare not say how much of
all this is owing to Thomas Paine; but I am inclined to think a good
portion of it decidedly is. Of the foul and foolish fictions yet told
abo