"What manner of man" Mr. Paine was, his works will best exhibit, and from these his public, and much of his private character will be best ascertained. But, as solicitude about the life of a great man and an extraordinary writer is common to all, it is here attempted to be gratified.

The Life of Mr. Paine by Francis Oldys* was written seventeen years before Mr. Paine's death; and was, in fact, drawn up by a person employed by a certain lord, and who was to have five hundred pounds for the job, if he calumniated and belied him to his lordship's and the ministry's satisfaction.

A continuation of this Life, printed at Philadelphia in 1796, is in the same strain as the above, and equally contemptible.

"The Life of Thomas Pain, the Author of Rights of "Man, with a Defence of his Writings, by Francis Oldys, "A. M. of the University of Pennsylvania: - Dublin printed." This silly and contemptible book against Mr. Paine and his writings, which was calculated every way to injure him and them, tells a falsehood in the title page, to secure its sale, by inserting in it," with a Defence of his Writings."

A most vile and scandalous memoir of him, with the name of William Cobbett as the author, though we hope he was not so, appeared in London about the year 1795 with this motto:

"A life that's one continued scene

"Of all that's infamous and mean."

Mr. James Cheetham's Life of Mr. Paine, published at New York after Mr. Paine's death in 1809, is a farrago of still more silly, trifling, false, and malicious matter. It is an outrageous attack upon him which bears, upon the face of it, idle gossiping, and gross misrepresentation.

The critique on this Life, in the British Review for June 1811, consists of more corrupt trash about Mr. Paine than even Cheetham's book, and is in its style inflated and bombastic to a laughable excess. Whence this came, and for what purposes published, the candid will readily discern, and cannot but lament the too frequent abuse, both by the tongue and by the pen, of characters entirely unknown to those

who libel them, and by whom, if they were known, they would be approved and esteemed.

Indeed the whole of these works are so ridiculously overstrained in their abuse that they carry their own antidote with them.

The Life by Cheetham is so palpably written to distort, disfigure, mislead, and vilify, and does this so bunglingly, that it defeats its own purposes, and becomes entertaining from the excess of its laboured and studied defamation.

It is indeed "Guilt's blunder," and subverts all it was intended to accomplish. It is filled with long details of uninteresting American matter, bickering letters of obscure individuals, gossiping stories of vulgar fanatics, prejudiced political cant, and weak observations on theology.

It may be supposed, from my long and affectionate intercourse with Mr. Paine, that these

memoirs will have an opposite bias, and pou tray too flattering and exalted a character of him.

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To this I reply, that I am not disposed to advocate the errors and irregularities of any man, however intimate with him, to suffer the partialities of friendship to prevent the due appreciation of character, or induce me to disregard the hallowed dictates of truth.

Mr. Paine was one of those men who,

Wise by some centuries before the croud,
Must by their novel systems, tho correct,
Of course offend the wicked, weak, and proud,
Must meet with hatred, calumny, neglect.

In his retirement to America, towards the close of his life, Mr. Paine was particularly unfortunate; for, as the author of the "Age of Reason," he could not have gone to so unfavorable a quarter of the world. A country, abounding in fanatics, could not be a proper one for him whose mind was bold, enquiring, liberal, and soaring, free from prejudice, and who from principle was a deist.

Of all wrath, fanatical wrath is the most intense; nor can it be matter of surprise that Mr. Paine received from great numbers in America' an unwelcome reception, and was treated with neglect and illiberality.

It is true on his return to that country in 1802, he received great attention from many of those who remembered the mighty influence of his writings in the gloomy period of the Revolution; and from others who had since embraced his principles; but these attentions were not, by many, long continued.

Thousands, who had formerly looked up to Mr. Paine as the principal founder of the Republic, had imbibed a strong dislike to him on account of his religious principles; and thousands more, who were opposed to his political principles, seized hold of the mean and dastardly expedient of attacking those principles thro the religious feelings and prejudices of the people. The vilest calumnies were constantly vented against him in the public papers, and