the putting Louis the XVIth to death. The famous or infamous manifesto issued by the Duke of Brunswick, in July 1792, had roused such a. spirit of hatred towards the Royal Family of France, and all other Royal Families, that nothing short of their utter destruction could appease the majority of the French nation. Mr. Paine willingly voted for the trial of Louis as a necessary exposure of Court intrigue and corruption; but when he found a disposition to destroy him at once, in preference to banishment, he exposed the safety of his own person in his endeavour to save the life of Louis. Mr. Paine was perfectly a humane man, he deprecated the punishment of death on any occasion whatever. His object was to destroy the monarchy, but not the man who had filled the office of monarch.

The following anecdote is another unparalleled instance of humanity, and the moral precept of returning good for evil. Mr. Paine happened to be dining one day with about twenty friends at a Coffee House in the Palais Egalité, now the Palais Royal, when unfortunately for the harmony of the company, a Captain in the English service contrived to introduce himself as one of the party. The military gentleman was a strenuous supporter of what is called in England, the constitution in church and state, and a decided enemy of the French Revolution. After the cloth was drawn, the conversation chiefly turned on the state of affairs in England, and the means which had been adopted by the government to check the increase of political knowledge. Mr. Paine delivered his opinions very freely, and much to the satisfaction of every one present, with the exception of Captain Grimstone, who returned his arguments by calling him a traitor to his country, with a variety of terms equally opprobrious. Mr. Paine treated his abuse with much good humour, which rendered the Captain so furious, that he walked up to the part of the room where Mr. Paine was sitting, and struck him a violent blow, which nearly knocked him off his seat. The cowardice of this behaviour from a stout young man towards a person of Mr. Paine's age (he being then upwards of sixty) is not the least disgraceful part of the transaction. There was, however, no time for reflections of this sort; an alarm was instantly given, that the Captain had struck a Citizen Deputy of the Convention, which was considered an insult to the nation at large; the offender was hurried into custody, and it was with the greatest difficulty that Mr. Paine prevented him from being executed on the spot.

It ought to be observed, that an act of the Convention had awarded the punishment of death to any one who should be convicted of striking a deputy; Mr. Paine was therefore placed in a very unpleasant situation. He immediately applied to Barrere, at that time president of the Committee of Public Safety, for a passport for his imprudent adversary, who after much hesitation complied with his request. It likewise occasioned Mr. Paine considerable personal inconvenience to procure his liberation; but even this was not sufficient; the Captain was without friends, and pennyless, and Mr. Paine generously supplied him with money to defray his travelling expences.

Louis fell under the guillotine, and Mr. Paine's deprecation of that act brought down upon him the hatred of the whole Robespierrean party. The reign of terror now commenced in France; every public man who breathed a sigh for Louis was denounced a traitor to the nation, and as such was put to death. Every man who complained of the despotism and violence of the party in power, was hurried to a prison, or before the Revolutionary Tribunal and to immediate execution. Mr. Paine, although a Member of the Convention, was first excluded on the ground of being a foreigner, and then thrown into prison because he had been born in England! His place of confinement was the Luxembourg; the time, about eleven months, during which he was seized with a most violent fever, that rendered him insensible to all that was passing, and to which circumstance he attributes his escape from the guillotine.

About this period Mr. Paine wrote his first and second part of Age of Reason. The first part was written before he went to the Luxembourg, as in his passage thither he deposited the manuscript with Joel Barlow. The second part he wrote during his confinement, and at a moment when he could not calculate on the preservation of his life for twenty-four hours: a circumstance which forms the best proof of his sincerity, and his conviction of the fallacy and imposture of all established religions: Throughout this work he has also trod the path of nature, and has laid down some of the best arguments to shew the existence of an Omnipotent Being, that ever were penned. Those who are in the habit of running down every thing that does not tally with their antiquated opinions, or the prejudices in which they have been educated, have decried Mr. Paine as an Atheist! Of all the men who ever wrote, Mr. Paine was the most remote from Atheism, and has advanced stronger arguments against the belief of no God, than any who have gone before him, or have lived since. If there be any chance of the failure of Mr. Paine's theological writings as a standard work, it will be on the ground of their being more superstitious than otherwise. However, their beauties, I doubt not, will at all times be a sufficient apology for a few trifling defects. Mr. Paine has been taxed with inconsistency in his theological opinions, because in his "Common Sense," and other political writings, he has had recourse to Bible phrases and arguments to illustrate some of his positions. But this can be no proof of hypocrisy, because his "Common Sense" and his other political writings were intended as a vehicle for political principles only, and they were addressed to the most superstitious people in the world. If Mr. Paine had published any of his Deistical opinions in "Common Sense" or "The Crisis," he would have defeated the very purpose for which he wrote. The Bible is a most convenient book to afford precedents; and any man might support any opinion or any assertion by quotations from it, Mr. Paine tells us in his first Crisis that he has no superstition about him, which was a pretty broad hint of what his opinions on that score were at that time, but it would have been the height of madness to have urged any religious dissension among the inhabitants of the United States during their hostile struggle for independence. Such is not a time to think about making converts to religious opinions. Mr. Paine has certainly made use of the common hack term, "Christian this" and "Christian that," in many parts of his political writings; but let it be recollected to whom he addressed himself, and the object he had in view, before a charge of' inconsistency be made. He first published his Age of Reason in France, where all compulsive systems of religion had been abolished, and here, certainly, he cannot be charged with being a disturber of religious opinions, because his work was translated and re-printed in the English language. He could have no objection to see it published in England, but it was by no means his own act, and he has expressly stated that he wrote it for the French nation and the United States. But truth will not be confined to a nation, nor to a continent, and there can never be an inconsistency proceeding from wrong to right, although there must naturally be a change.

After the fall of Robespierre and his faction, and the arrival of Mr. Monroe, a new minister from America, Mr. Paine was liberated from his most painful imprisonment, and again solicited to take his seat in the Convention, which he accordingly did. Again his utmost efforts were used to establish a constitution on correct principles and universal liberty, united with security both for person and property. He wrote his "Dissertation on First Principles of Government," and presented it to the Convention, accompanied with a speech, pointing out the defects of the then existing constitution.

Intrigue is the natural characteristic of Frenchmen, and they never