said. "I will give thee neither," and again shut the door. And then Mr. Ward thundered with the knocker of the door, and the Doctor returued in great wrath and said, "Thou art mad, or possessed with an evil spirit: what wilt thou have now!" Mr. Ward replied, "Since you, sir, will not give lodg ings, nor money, nor food, nor drink to me, I pray for your advice; will you direct me to a stew?" The Doctor cried out, "Vagrant of all vagrants! the curse of God will fall on thee; thou art one of the noa-elects. Dost thou, villain, suppose that I am acquainted with bad houses? What dost thou want at a stew?" Mr. Ward replied, "I am hungry, weary, thirsty, moneyless, and almost naked; and Solomon, the wisest king the Jews ever had, tells me and you, that a whore will bring a man to a morsel of bread at the last." Now Dr. Mather awoke from his reveread dream, and cried, "Tu es Wardonus vel Diabolus," Mr. Ward laughed, and the Doctor took him in and gave him all he wanted; and Mr. Ward preached for the Doctor next day, both morning and evening This event had its due effect on the Doctor ever after, and he kept the Shunamite's chamber, and became hospitable and charitable to all in want.

It corrected the Doctor's temper to such a degree, that six months after, he cea ed to pray more against the pope and conclave of Rome, and supplied the vazuma, by praying for the downfall of the red dragon at Morocco, Egypt, and Arabia, on the east side of the Red Sea, even at Mecca and Medina; words which helped the sand to pass through the hour-glass, the orthodox length of a prayer.

It is, perhaps, not the best manners to apply chronology to an anec lote, but if we look at the facts of this case, it is rather unfortunate for good Dr. Peters that Ward died ten years before Cotton Mather, whom the story was probably intended to fit, was born; and if, to give the joke another chance, we carry it back to Increase Mather, Ward left New England when that quaint divine was but eight years old, and died three years before that elder Mather graduated. If we were disposed still further to go into particulars, we might remark that Ward's Agawam was not on the Connecticut; that he did not write a history of that place; that the cobbler was not remarkably free from bigotry; and that Dr. Mather's Stilts for Dwarfs" is not to be found mentioned in any respectable bibliographical work.

Dr. Peters made a journey to the West, to the Falls of St. Anthony, in prosecution of some land claims, in 1817. He died at New York, April 19, 1826, at the venerable age of 90.

In conclusion, if he may be allowed to be his own eulogist, "he is reputed," says he of himself, "to have the faculties of his uncle Hugh, the zeal and courage of his grand-parent, General Thomas Harrison, mixed with the benevolence that characterize 1 his great-grand-parent, Williain Peters, Esq., of 1634."

THOMAS GODFREY.

THOMAS GODFREY was born in the city of Philadel phia, in the year 1736. His father, a glazier by trade, was an accomplished mathematician, and the inventor of the quadrant,* commonly known

Barlow, in his notices of the men of elenco in America In the eighth book of the Columbiad, pays this tribute to Godfrey:

as Hadley's Quadrant. He died a few years after the birth of his son, who, after receiving “a coinmon education in his mother tongue," was ap prenticed to a watch-maker by his relatives. The pursuit was one contrary to his inclinations, which were bent on the study of painting, but he remained at the trade until 1758, when he obtained a lieutenant's commnission in the Pennsyl vania forces raised in that year for the expedition

The Godfrey

against Fort Du Quesne. On the disbanding of the troops he removed to Carolina, to accept a situation as a factor, which had been offered to him. Here he remained three years, during which he wrote his tragedy of The Prince of Parthia. He sent the manuscript on to a friend in Philadelphia, to be offered to the American company performing in that city in 1759, but it was never produced. On the death of his employer he returned to his native city, and, no opening offering there, sailed as a supercargo to the island of New Providence, returning from thence to North Carolina, where a few weeks after his arrival, by exposure to the sun on horseback, an exercise to which he was unaccustomed, he contracted a fever which put an end to his life after a week's illness, on the third of August, 1763.

Godfrey, in addition to his tragedy, wrote a poem of five hundred lines, entitled, The Court of Fancy, modelled on Chaucer's House of Fame, a number of short poems on subjects of the day, a few pastorals in the style then in vogue, and a modernized version of a portion of Chaucer's Assembly of Fowles. Most of these appeared during his lifetime in the American Magazine, published in Philadelphia, from which a portion were copied with commendatory remarks in the London Monthly Review. His poetical writings were published in Philadelphia in 1767, with a biographical preface by N. Evans, in which he "bespeaks the candour of the public in behalf of the collection, as the first of the kind which the Province has produced." The volume also contains an anonymous critical analysis of the poems, written by Dr. William Smith.* The whole work forms a quarto volume of 224 pages.

The Prince of Parthia was the first dramatic work written in America. It possesses much merit, with many marks of hasty composition, and want of mental maturity. The plot is drawn from an ancient story, and is well developed, though the fifth act presents the usual excess of bloodshed common to tragedies by youthful authors. The opening scene, descriptive of the triumphant return of the youthful hero, Arsaces, from a successful war, is one of the best in the play, but shows, like many subsequent pas

tones sounded the notes of resistance to oppres sion, and faith in the success of the armies of Washington. In this mixed world of good and evil, we must learn to separate virtues and vices, and "pick our good from out much ill."

J Jaine

Thomas Paine was born of Quaker parentage, the son of a stay-maker, at Thetford, in the county of Norfolk, England, January 29, 1786. He received a grammar-school education in his native town, and early developed a taste for poetry, which his parents discouraged, confining him at the age of thirteen, for the next five years, to his father's uninteresting and laborious calling. In his twentieth year, young Paine went to London, where he worked at his trade, relieving its monotony by a cruise in a privateer. In 1758 he is stay-maker again at Dover, and in 1759, in the same occupation at Sandwich, where he mar ried the daughter of an.exciseman, who died the following year. The occupation of his father-inlaw opened a new prospect for him, and he abandoned his trade for an office in the excise, which he attained after some preliminary training in his home at Thetford, at the age of twenty-five. His business of exciseman was varied by employment as teacher in two London academies, a position which enabled him to acquire some philosophical knowledge from the lectures delivered in the metropolis. In 1768 he became established at Lewes, in Sussex, as exciseman, where he married the daughter of a grocer and tobacconist recently deceased, to whose trade he succeeded. He be longed to a club of the place, where he maintained his stiff Whig opinions with pertinacity and ele gance of expression. He wrote at Lewes his ode lished in the Gentleman's Magazine. on the Death of General Wolfe, which was pub

His business as a grocer seems to have led him into some unwarrantable smuggling practices, for which he was dismissed the service in 1774, when he went to London as an adventurer, having previously parted with his wife by mutual

agreement. Ile was fortunate in procuring a letter to Benjamin Franklin from a commissioner of the excise, who had been impressed with the ability with which Paine had uiged an increase of salary for the officers of that body, in a pamphlet which he had drawn up in their behalf. Franklin advised him to go to America, whither he set off immediately, reaching Philadelphia in the beginning of the year 1775, on the eve of the actual outbreak of the Revolution. He was at once employed by Aitken,* a bookseller of that city, with a salary of £25 currency a year, as editor of the Pennsylvanian Magazine, for which he wrote the introduction, a felicitous sentence of which has been noticed by his biographers. Alluding to the season, January, and the quite as chilling nature of such enterprises in those times, he says: "Thus encompassed with difficulties, this first number of the Pennsylvanian Magazine entreats a favorable reception; of which we shall only say, that like the early snowdrop it comes forth in a barren season, and contents itself with foretelling the reader that choicer flowers are preparing to appear." Dr. Rush, who was attracted by his clever conduct of the Magazine,† formed his acquaintance in Aitken's bookstore, and suggested to him the preparation of a popular book to meet the objections to separation from the mother country. This was the origin of the famous pamphlet Common Sense. Paine thought of calling it "Plain Truth," when Rush suggested the title which it bears.

66

Its influence upon the American cause was very great. Rush says it was published with an effect which has been rarely produced by types and paper in any age or country." "I think this pamphlet," says Aslibel Green, of Princeton, in his autobiography, had a greater run than any other ever published in our country. It was printed anonymou-ly, and it was a considerable time before its author was known or suspected. In the meantime large editions were frequently issued; and in newspapers, at taverns, and at almost every place of public resort, it was advertised, and very generally in these words: Common Sense, for eighteen-pence.' I lately looked

Robert Aitken was a Scotchman who came to Philadel phia in 1769, and was a bookseller and printer. In the RevoIntion he sided with the American interest, and arrowly escaped a residence in the prison ships of New York. He published the Pennsylvania Magazine, or American Monthly Museum, from Jan. 1775, to June 1776. It had Francis Hopkinson and Witherspoon for contributors. Aitken died in 152, at the age of sixty-eight-Thomas's Ilist. of Printing, il. 76.

The ode on Wolfe and some spirited Reflections on Lord Clive, from his pen, printed in the Magazine, were noticeable articles for the time.

The original edition of “Common Sense" was published in Philadelphia by Robert Bell, with whom it is said that Paine was then employed as a clerk.-Notes on the Provincial Hist of Penn. by T. J. Wharton, Penn. Hist. Soc. Memoirs, 1825, p. 151, where some amusing detalls are given of Bell. He was a Scotsman, who came to Philadelphia in 1766. He had been a partner as a bookseller in Dublin with the facetious George Alexander Stevens Ile was first an auctioneer, and afterwards a bookseller in Philadelphia, where he published Blackstone's Commentaries by subscription in 1772, “a stupendous enterprise for the time." The Revolution broke up his busi ness, and he turned auctioneer again and peddler, dying at Richmond, in Virginia, in 174. He headed his auction announcements, "Jewels and diamonds to be sold or sacrificed by Robert Bell, humble provedore to the sentimentalists," and Fought subscribers to Blackstone with the invitation, "Inten tional encouragers who wish for a participation of this senti mental banquet, are requested to send their names to Robert Bell"

into a copy of this pamphlet, and was ready to wonder at its popularity, and the effect it produced when originally published. But the truth is, it struck a string which required but a touch to make it vibrate. The country was ripe for independence, and only needed somebody to tell the people so, with decision, boldness, and plausibility. Paine did this recklessly, having nothing to do whether his suggestions were received favorably or unfavorably, while wiser and better men than he were yet maturing their minds by reflection, and looking well to every step which they took or advised. Paine's talent, and he certainly possessed it eminently, was, to make a taking and striking appeal to popular feelings, when he saw it tending towards a point to which he wished to push it, whether for good or for evil."*

"I sent you from New York," writes John Adams to his wife, Philadelphia, February 18, 1776, “a pamphlet intituled Common Sense, written in vindication of doctrines which there is reason to expect that the further encroachments of tyranny and deprecations of oppression will soon make the common faith; unless the cunning ministry, by proposing negotiations and terms of reconciliation, should divert the present current from its channel."†

No copyright was taken out; it was printed to the number of a hundred thousand, and its author, in the midst of success, was in debt to his printer for the work.

Paine's subsequent pretensions to priority in his Common Sense in setting the ball of revolution in motion were simply absurd. He arrived a foreigner under difliculties, a few months before the battle of Lexington. John Adams, in a letter to Rush, May 1, 1807. seriously notices these vaporings. The fact is that Paine, admitting his merits to the full, was a humble though useful servant of the cause, never its master.

The University of Pennsylvania made him Master of Arts, and the legislature voted him the substantial honor of five hundred pounds. In 1776 he served as a volunteer in the army, and was with Washington in his retreat before lowe to the Delaware. To arouse the spirit of the people and soldiery he commenced the publication of the series of patriotic tracts, The Crisis, the first number of which appeared December 19, 1776, and the last on the attainment of peace, April 19, 1783. There were eighteen numbers in all. Number one is now before us, as it may have been read to the corporal's guard in the camp-eight small octavo pages, in neat pica, and on very dingy paper. Its first stirring sentence is still familiar as a proverb:-"These are the times that try men's souls: the summer soldier

Life of Ashbel Green, 46. The following lines appear in Carey's American Museum, 1. 167:—

American Indeperd nce.

When pregrant Nature strove relief to gain,
Her nurse was Washington, her midwife Paino:
The infant, Independence, scarce began

To be, ere he had ripen'd into man.
France his godfather, Biltain was his rod,
Congress his guardian, and his father God.

✦ John Adams, in his diary of 1779, tells us that on his ar rival in France in that year, he was greeted as the famous Adams on the strength of the authorship of this pamphlet, which was transisted into French, having been ascribed to him.-Works, ill. 1-9,

Works, ix. 691.

and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink | from the service of his country; but he that stands it Now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman." The rest was as good; sarcas:n for the enemy, eulogy for Washington, and a picturesque account of the camp scenes in which he had been engaged. After this, as Cheetham remarks: "Paine's pen was an appendage almost as necessary to the army of independence, and as formidable, as its cannon;" and he attributes "much of the brilliant little affair" which in the same month followed at Trenton, to the contidence inspired by this first number. Paine wrote a second on that victory; a third at Philadelphia in April, 1777, in which month he was elected by Congress Secretary to the Committee of Foreign Affairs, a post which he held till 1779, when he was dismissed from the office for a violation of confidence in publishing a delicate statement affecting the loan or gift from France in opposition to the claim of the negotiator. Silas Deane. The remaining numbers of the Crisis were occupied, as occasion arose, with war or finance, the encouragement of the army at home, and witty disparagement of the enemy in America and in Parliament. General Sir William Howe and Lord North were particular objects of his invective. Of the honors paid to the former, he says: "There are knights of various orders, from the knight of the windmill to the knight of tho post," and proposes as a final substitute for the Egyptian method of embalming the more frugal American plan: "In a balmage, sir, of humble tar, you will be as secure as Pharaoh, and in a hieroglyphic of feathers rival in finery all the mummies of Egypt."

In 1780, Paine was appointed clerk to the Assembly in Pennsylvania. In 1781, he accompanied Col. Laurens in his mission to France, to obtain a loan. They set out in February, and returned in August with two millions and a half of specie. In 1782, he had published at Philadelphia his Letter to the Abbé Raynal; a neat production, correcting erroneous statements touching the Revolution, in which he shows his own skill in rhetoric at the expense of the foreign writer.

Paine's services during the war time were properly acknowledged by the government. When Washington was about resigning his commission to Congress, and was at Rocky Hill in the neighborhood of Princeton, he sent a letter to Paine at Bordentown, acknowledging his services, offering to impress them upon Congress, and inviting hin to his table. In 1785, Congress discharged the obligation by a grant of three thousand dollars; Pennsylvania presented him five hundred pounds, and New York conferred upon him a handsome estate at New Rochelle, confiscated from a Royalist, which embraced three hundred acres of land. In 1787, Paine returned to Europe, carrying with him the model of an iron bridge, which he made some stir with in England. Finding his mother in want, he settled upon her a stated payment for her support. When Burke's Reflections on the French Revolution appeared, he published his reply, the Rights of Man, the first part in 1791; the second in 1792. It has been generally acknowledged to be a work of ability. Many of its points of attack upon the British constitution are strongly taken, and held with success. Its

views of hereditary Kingcraft and of Democra tic representations, have passed, in this country at least, into truisins. One passage is very felicitous in expression, where he is picturing in terins equal to the language of the great writer whom he is answering, that orator's oversight of the victims of despotism in his poetical coinmiseration for the fate of its royal perpetrators. "Not one glance of compassion, not one commiserating reflection, that I can find throughout his book, has he bestowed on those who lingered out the most wretched of lives, a life without hope, in the most miserable of prisons. It is painful to behold a man employing his talents to corrupt himself. Nature has been kinder to Mr. Burke than he is to her. He is not affected by the reality of distress touching his heart, but by the showy resemblance of it striking his imagination. He pities the plumage, but forgets the dying bird. Accustomed to kiss the aristocratical hand that hath purloined him from himself, he degenerates into a composition of art, and the genuine soul of nature forsakes him. His hero, or his heroine, must be a tragedy victim expiring in show, and not the real prisoner of misery sliding into death in the silence of a dungeon."

A state prosecution was on foot against him when a French deputation called him to France, to sit in Convention for the departinent of Calais. Ilis reception on his arrival there in 1792 was sufficiently gratifying to his vanity. In the Convention, though he voted for the trial of the king, he endeavored to preserve his life by a speech, in which he recommended banishment to America. "Let," said he, "the United States be the safeguard and asylum of Louis Capet. There, hereafter, far removed from the miseries and crimes of royalty, he may learn, from the constant aspect of public prosperity, that the true system of government consists in fair equal, and honorable representation." He was engaged in Constitutionmaking with Condorcet. lle attracted the ill will of the extreme party, and was arrested and sent to prison by Robespierre, on the plea of being a foreigner, by the same vote which consigned famous Anacharsis Clootz to a dungeon and the guillotine. Paine escaped the latter fate by an accident. He was imprisoned (he writes in one of his letters) on a corridor of the Luxembourg, the door of his room opening outwards. While in this po sition it was marked by the officers for its supply of victims. When they came round the door was shut and the mark on the inside; so Paine was not guillotined; and the tyrant falling shortly after, Monroe, the American ambassador, reclaimed him and took him to his house. Ilis imprisonment lasted eleven months, from Dec. 1793 to Nov. 1794. A first part of his infidel work, The Age of Reason, was published while Paine was in prison. The second part appeared in 1796.

In the same year with the completion of this wretched publication, Paino sent forth in Paris his Letter to George Washington, whom he charged with neglecting to use the influence of government for his release as an American citizen, and not content with this discussion, depreciated for the lack of qualities which he had expressly attributed to him in his American publications

• Paine gave rout to his feelings in the following opigram