“Here lies Tom Paine, who wrote in liberty’s defence,
  And in his ‘Age of Reason’ lost his ‘Common Sense.’”

Ten years after, William Cobbett, who had left England in a fit of political disgust and had settled himself on Long Island to raise hogs and ruta-bagas, resolved to go home again.  Cobbett had become an admirer, almost a disciple of Paine.  The “Constitution-grinder” of ’96 was now “a truly great man, a truly philosophical politician, a mind as far superior to Pitt and Burke as the light of a flambeau is superior to that of a rush-light.”  Above all, Paine had been Cobbett’s teacher on financial questions.  In 1803, Cobbett read his “Decline and Fall of the English System,” and then “saw the whole matter in its true light; and neither pamphleteers nor speech-makers were after that able to raise a momentary puzzle in his mind.”  Perhaps Cobbett thought he might excite a sensation in England and rally about him the followers of Paine, or it may be that he wished to repair the gross injustice he had done him by some open act of adherence; at all events, he exhumed Paine’s body and took the bones home with him in 1819, with the avowed intention of erecting a magnificent monument to his memory by subscription.  In the same manner, about two thousand two hundred and fifty years ago, the bones of Theseus, the mythical hero of Democracy, were brought from Skyros to Athens by some Attic [Greek:  Kobbetaes].  The description of the arrival in England we quote from a Liverpool journal of the day:—­“When his last trunk was opened at the Custom-House, Cobbett observed to the surrounding spectators, who had assembled in great numbers,—­’Here are the bones of the late Thomas Paine.’  This declaration excited a visible sensation, and the crowd pressed forward to see the contents of the package.  Cobbett remarked,—­’Great, indeed, must that man have been whose very bones attract such attention!’ The officer took up the coffin-plate inscribed, ’Thomas Paine, Aged 72.  Died January 8, 1809,’ and, having lifted up several of the bones, replaced the whole and passed them.  They have since been forwarded from this town to London.”

At a public dinner given to Cobbett in Liverpool, Paine was toasted as “the Noble of Nature, the Child of the Lower Orders”; but the monument was never raised, and no one knows where his bones found their last resting-place.

Cobbett himself gained nothing by this resurrectionist performance, except an additional couplet in the party-songs of the day:—­

  “Let Cobbett of borough-corruption complain,
  And go to the De’il with the bones of Tom Paine.”

The two were classed together by English Conservatives, as “pestilent fellows” and “promoters of sedition.”