“How Tom gets a living now, or what brothel he inhabits, I know not, nor does it much signify.  He has done all the mischief he can do in this world; and whether his carcass is at last to be suffered to rot on the earth, or to be dried in the air, is of very little consequence.  Whenever or wherever he breathes his last, he will excite neither sorrow nor compassion; no friendly hand will close his eyes, not a groan will be uttered, not a tear will be shed.  Like Judas, he will be remembered by posterity; men will learn to express all that is base, malignant, treacherous, unnatural, and blasphemous by the single monosyllable of Paine.”

Cobbett also wrote an ante-mortem epitaph, a fit inscription for the life he had composed.  It ends thus:—­

  “He is crammed in a dungeon and preaches up Reason;
  Blasphemes the Almighty, lives in filth like a hog;
  Is abandoned in death, and interred like a dog.”

This brutal passage does not exaggerate the opinion of Paine’s character held by the good people of America.  He was an object of horror to them,—­a rebel against government and against God,—­a type of Jacobinism, a type of Infidelity, and, with what seemed to them, no doubt, a beautiful consistency, a type of all that was abandoned and vile.  Thomas Paine, a Massachusetts poet of ci-devant celebrity, petitioned the General Court for permission to call himself Robert Treat Paine, on the ground that he had no Christian name.  In New England, Christianity and Federalism were looked upon as intimately connected, and Democracy as a wicked thing, born of Tom Paine, Tom Jefferson, and the Father of Lies.  In this Trinity of Evil, Thomas Paine stood first.

During the struggle for the Presidency, Mr. Jefferson had been accused, from every Federal stump, of the two unpardonable sins to Yankee minds,—­namely, that his notes could be bought for five shillings in the pound, and that he did not believe in Revolution.  Since his election, he had been daily reminded of his religious short-comings by keen newspaper attacks.  He knew that he strengthened the hands of his enemies by inviting home the Arch-Infidel.  We are and were then a religious people, in spite of the declaration in Mr. Adams’s Tripolitan treaty that the government of the United States was “not in any sense founded on the Christian religion,” and Paine could find few admirers in any class.  Mr. Jefferson, too, was well aware that the old man was broken, that the fire had gone out of him, and that his presence in the United States could be of no use whatever to the party.  But he thought that Paine’s services in the Revolution had earned for him an asylum, and their old acquaintance made him hasten to offer it.  We think that the invitation to Paine was one of the manliest acts of Jefferson’s life.