part in the history of this country after 1783 is of so small importance, that in a life of him all such considerations may be safely waived.  The democratic movement of the last eighty years, be it a “finality,” or only a phase of progress towards a more perfect state, is the grand historical fact of modern times, and Paine’s name is intimately connected with it.  One is always ready to look with lenity on the partiality of a biographer,—­whether he urge the claims of his hero to a niche in the Valhalla of great men, or act as the Advocatus Diaboli to degrade his memory.

OF BOOKS AND THE READING THEREOF.

BEING A THIRD LETTER FROM PAUL POTTER, OF NEW YORK, IN THE CITY AND COUNTY OF NEW YORK, ESQ., TO THE DON ROBERTO WAGONERO, OF WASHINGTON, olim, BUT nunc OF NOWHEREINPARTICULAR.

If any person, O my Bobus, had foretold that all these months would go by before I should again address you, he would have exhibited prescient talent great enough to establish twenty “mediums” in a flourishing cabalistic business.  Alas! they have been to me months of fathomless distress, immensurate and immeasurable sorrow, and blank, blind, idiotic indifference, even to books and friends, which, next to the nearest and dearest, are the world’s most priceless possession.  But now that I have a little thrown off the stupor, now that kindly Time has a little balmed my cruel wounds, I come back to my books and to you,—­to the animi remissionem of Cicero,—­to these gentle sympathizers and faithful solacements,—­to old studies and ancient pursuits.  There is a Latin line, I know not whose, but Swift was fond of quoting it,—­

  "Vertiginosus, inops, surdus, male gratus amicis,"—­

which I have whispered to myself, with prophetic lips, in the long, long watches of my lonesome nights.  Do you remember—­but who that has read it does not?—­that affecting letter, written upon the death of his wife, by Sir James Mackintosh to Dr. Parr?  “Such was she whom I have lost; and I have lost her when her excellent natural sense was rapidly improving, after eight years of struggle and distress had bound us fast together and moulded our tempers to each other,—­when a knowledge of her worth had refined my youthful love into friendship, before age had deprived it of much of its original ardor.  I lost her, alas! (the choice of my youth, and the partner of my misfortunes,) at a moment when I had the prospect of her sharing my better days.”

But if I am getting old, although perhaps prematurely, I must be casting about for the subsidia senectuti.  Swift wrote to Gay, that these were “two or three servants about you and a convenient house”; justly observing, that, “when a man grows hard to please, few people care whether he be pleased or no”; and adding, sadly enough, “I should hardly prevail to find one visitor, if I were not able to hire him with a bottle of wine”; and