ater life:--

"Here lies Tom Paine, who wrote in liberty's defence,
And in his 'Age of Reason' lost his 'Common Sense.'"

Ten years after, William Cobbett, who had left England in a fit of
political disgust and had settled himself on Long Island to raise
hogs and ruta-bagas, resolved to go home again. Cobbett had become an
admirer, almost a disciple of Paine. The "Constitution-grinder" of '96
was now "a truly great man, a truly philosophical politician, a mind as
far superior to Pitt and Burke as the light of a flambeau is superior to
that of a rush-light." Above all, Paine had been Cobbett's teacher on
financial questions. In 1803, Cobbett read his "Decline and Fall of the
English System," and then "saw the whole matter in its true light; and
neither pamphleteers nor speech-makers were after that able to raise a
momentary puzzle in his mind." Perhaps Cobbett thought he might excite a
sensation in England and rally about him the followers of Paine, or it
may be that he wished to repair the gross injustice he had done him by
some open act of adherence; at all events, he exhumed Paine's body and
took the bones home with him in 1819, with the avowed intention of
erecting a magnificent monument to his memory by subscription. In the
same manner, about two thousand two hundred and fifty years ago, the
bones of Theseus, the mythical hero of Democracy, were brought from
Skyros to Athens by some Attic [Greek: Kobbetaes]. The description
of the arrival in England we quote from a Liverpool journal of the
day:--"When his last trunk was opened at the Custom-House, Cobbett
observed to the surrounding spectators, who had assembled in great
numbers,--'Here are the bones of the late Thomas Paine.' This
declaration excited a visible sensation, and the crowd pressed forward
to see the contents of the package. Cobbett remarked,--'Great, indeed,
must that man have been whose very bones attract such attention!' The
officer took up the coffin-plate inscribed, 'Thomas Paine, Aged 72. Died
January 8, 1809,' and, having lifted up several of the bones, replaced
the whole and passed them. They have since been forwarded from this town
to London."

At a public dinner given to Cobbett in Liverpool, Paine was toasted as
"the Noble of Nature, the Child of the Lower Orders"; but the monument
was never raised, and no one knows where his bones found their last
resting-place.

Cobbett himself gained nothing by this resurrectionist performance,
exc