I can well remember when an asserted intimacy with the writings of Paine marked a man from his fellows and invested him in children’s minds with a horrid fascination.  The writings themselves were only to be seen in bookshops of evil reputation, and, when hastily turned over with furtive glances, proved to be printed in small type and on villainous paper.  For a boy to have bought them and taken them inside a decent home would have been to run the risk of fierce wrath in this life and the threat of it in the next.  If ever there was a hung dog, his name was Tom Paine.

But History is, as we know, for ever revising her records.  None of her judgments are final.  A life of Thomas Paine, in two portly and well-printed volumes, with gilt tops, wide margins, spare leaves at the end, and all the other signs and tokens of literary respectability, has lately appeared.  No President, no Prime Minister—­nay, no Bishop or Moderator—­need hope to have his memoirs printed in better style than are these of Thomas Paine, by Mr. Moncure D. Conway.  Were any additional proof required of the complete resuscitation of Paine’s reputation, it might be found in the fact that his life is in two volumes, though it would have been far better told in one.

Mr. Conway believes implicitly in Paine—­not merely in his virtue and intelligence, but that he was a truly great man, who played a great part in human affairs.  He will no more admit that Paine was a busybody, inflated with conceit and with a strong dash of insolence, than he will that Thomas was a drunkard.  That Paine’s speech was undoubtedly plain and his nose undeniably red is as far as Mr. Conway will go.  If we are to follow the biographer the whole way, we must not only unhang the dog, but give him sepulture amongst the sceptred Sovereigns who rule us from their urns.

Thomas Paine was born at Thetford, in Norfolk, in January, 1737, and sailed for America in 1774, then being thirty-seven years of age.  Up to this date he was a rank failure.  His trade was staymaking, but he had tried his hand at many things.  He was twice an Excise officer, but was twice dismissed the service, the first time for falsely pretending to have made certain inspections which, in fact, he had not made, and the second time for carrying on business in an excisable article—­tobacco, to wit—­without the leave of the Board.  Paine had married the tobacconist’s business, but neither the marriage nor the business prospered; the second was sold by auction, and the first terminated by mutual consent.

Mr. Conway labours over these early days of his hero very much, but he can make nothing of them.  Paine was an Excise officer at Lewes, where, so Mr. Conway reminds us, ’seven centuries before Paine opened his office in Lewes, came Harold’s son, possibly to take charge of the Excise as established by Edward the Confessor, just deceased.’  This device of biographers is a little stale.  The Confessor was guiltless of the Excise.