When the matter became public, there arose a long, loud cry of abuse, which rang from Massachusetts Bay to Washington City.  Anarchy, confusion, and the downfall of not only church, but state, were declared to be the unavoidable consequences of Paine’s return to our shores,—­that impious apostate! that Benedict Arnold, once useful, and then a traitor!  The “United States Gazette” had ten leaders on the text of Tom Paine and Jefferson, “whose love of liberty was neither more rational, generous, or social, than that of the wolf or the tiger.”  The “New England Palladium” fairly shrieked:—­“What! invite to the United States that lying, drunken, brutal infidel, who rejoices in the opportunity of basking and wallowing in the confusion, devastation, bloodshed, rapine, and murder, in which his soul delights?” Why, even the French called him the English orang-outang!  He was exposed with a monkey and a bear in a cage in Paris.  In 1792, he was forbidden to haunt the White-Bear Tavern in London.  He subsisted for eight years on the charity of booksellers, who employed him in the morning to correct proofs; in the afternoon he was too drunk.  He lodged in a cellar.  He helped the poissardes to clean fish and open oysters.  He lived in misery, filth, and contempt.  Not until Livingston went to France did any respectable American call upon him.  Livingston’s attentions to him not only astonished, but disgusted the First Consul, and gave him a very mean opinion of Livingston’s talents.  The critical Mr. Dennie caused his “Portfolio” to give forth this solemn strain:  “If, during the present season of national abasement, infatuation, folly, and vice, any portent could surprise, sober men would be utterly confounded by an article current in all our newspapers, that the loathsome Thomas Paine, a drunken atheist and the scavenger of faction, is invited to return in a national ship to America by the first magistrate of a free people.  A measure so enormously preposterous we cannot yet believe has been adopted, and it would demand firmer nerves than those possessed by Mr. Jefferson to hazard such an insult to the moral sense of the nation.  If that rebel rascal should come to preach from his Bible to our populace, it would be time for every honest and insulted man of dignity to flee to some Zoar as from another Sodom, to shake off the very dust of his feet and to abandon America.”  “He is coming,” wrote Noah Webster, ("the mender and murderer of English,”) “to publish in America the third part of the ‘Age of Reason.’” And the epigrammatists, such as they were, tried their goose-quills on the subject:—­

  “He passed his forces in review,
  Smith, Cheetham, Jones, Duane: 
  ‘Dull rascals,—­these will never do,’
  Quoth he,—­’I’ll send for Paine.’

  “Then from his darling den in France
  To tempt the wretch to come,
  He made Tom’s brain with flattery dance
  And took the tax from rum.”

The Administration editors held their tongues;—­the religious side of the question was too strong for them.