It is true that Thomas Paine lived but a short time in Greenwich, and that the long play of his full and colourful career was enacted before he came to spend his last days in the Village.  But he is none the less an essential part of Greenwich; his illustrious memory is so signal a source of pride to the neighbourhood, his personality seems still so vividly present, that his life and acts must have a place there, too.  The street that was named “Reason” because of him, suggests the persecutions abroad and at home which followed the writing of that extraordinary and daring book “The Age of Reason.”  The name of Mme. de Bonneville, who chose for him the little frame house on the site which is now about at 59 Grove Street, recalls his dramatic life chapter in Paris, where he first met the De Bonnevilles.  So, you see, one cannot write of Thomas Paine in Greenwich, without writing of Thomas Paine in the great world—­working, fighting, pleading, suffering, lighting a million fires of courage and of inspiration, living so hard and fast and strenuously, that to read over his experiences, his experiments and his achievements, is like reading the biographies of a score of different busy men!

He was born of Quaker parentage, at Thetford, Norfolk, in England, on January 29, 1737, and pursued many avocations before he found his true vocation—­that of a world liberator, and apostle of freedom and human rights.  One of his most sympathetic commentators, H.M.  Brailsford, says of him: 

“His writing is of the age of enlightenment; his actions belong to romance....  In his spirit of adventure, in his passion for movement and combat, there Paine is romantic.  Paine thought in prose and acted epics.  He drew horizons on paper and pursued the infinite in deeds.”

Let us see where this impulse of romance and adventure led him; it was into strange enough paths at first!

He was a mere boy—­fifteen or sixteen, if I remember accurately—­when the lure of the sea seized him.  It is reported that he signed up on a privateer (the Captain of which was appropriately called Death!), putting out from England, and sailed with her piratical crew for a year.  This was doubtless adventurous enough, but young Thomas already wanted adventure of a different and a higher order.  He came back and went into his Quaker father’s business—­which was that of a staymaker, of all things!  He got his excitement by studying astronomy!

Then he became an exciseman—­what was sometimes called “gauger”—­and was speedily cashiered for negligence.  Anyone may have three guesses as to his reported next ambition.  More than one historian has declared that he wished to take orders in the Church of England.  This is, however, extremely unlikely.  In any case, he changed his mind in time, and was again taken on as exciseman.  Likewise, he was again dismissed.  This time they fired him for advocating higher wages and writing a pamphlet on the subject.  The reform fever had caught him, you perceive, and he was nevermore free from it, to the day of his death.