in the hands of tyrants.  This way of accounting for Christianity would not now be accepted by even the most “advanced” thinkers.  The contest between skepticism and revelation has long since shifted to other grounds.  Both the philosophy and the temper of the Age of Reason belong to the eighteenth century.  But Paine’s downright pugnacious method of attack was effective with shrewd, half-educated doubters; and in America well-thumbed copies of his book passed from hand to hand in many a rural tavern or store, where the village atheist wrestled in debate with the deacon or the schoolmaster.  Paine rested his argument against Christianity upon the familiar grounds of the incredibility of miracles, the falsity of prophecy, the cruelty or immorality of Moses and David and other Old Testament worthies, the disagreement of the evangelists in their gospels, etc.  The spirit of his book and his competence as a critic are illustrated by his saying of the New Testament:  “Any person who could tell a story of an apparition, or of a man’s walking, could have made such books, for the story is most wretchedly told.  The sum total of a parson’s learning is a-b, ab, and hic, hoec, hoc, and this is more than sufficient to have enabled them, had they lived at the time, to have written all the books of the New Testament.”

When we turn from the political and controversial writings of the Revolution to such lighter literature as existed, we find little that would deserve mention in a more crowded period.  The few things in this kind that have kept afloat on the current of time—­rari nantes in gurgite vasto—­attract attention rather by reason of their fewness than of any special excellence that they have.  During the eighteenth century American literature continued to accommodate itself to changes of taste in the old country.  The so-called classical or Augustan writers of the reign of Queen Anne replaced other models of style; the Spectator set the fashion of almost all of our lighter prose, from Franklin’s Busybody down to the time of Irving, who perpetuated the Addisonian tradition later than any English writer.  The influence of Locke, of Dr. Johnson, and of the parliamentary orators has already been mentioned.  In poetry the example of Pope was dominant, so that we find, for example, William Livingston, who became governor of New Jersey and a member of the Continental Congress, writing in 1747 a poem on Philosophic Solitude which reproduces the tricks of Pope’s antitheses and climaxes with the imagery of the Rape of the Lock, and the didactic morality of the Imitations from Horace and the Moral Essays: 

  “Let ardent heroes seek renown to arms,
  Pant after fame and rush to war’s alarms;
  To shining palaces let fools resort,
  And dunces cringe to be esteemed at court. 
  Mine be the pleasure of a rural life,
  From noise remote and ignorant of strife,
  Far from the painted belle and white-gloved beau,
  The lawless masquerade and midnight show;
  From ladies, lap-dogs, courtiers, garters, stars,
  Fops, fiddlers, tyrants, emperors, and czars.”