his government. But the cold, unfeeling partisanship of the great
democrat saved the nation.

The other crowning difference between the two men is, Mr. Paine had
extraordinary genius, Mr. Jefferson had not; and by genius I mean a
lively constructive and comprehensive mind, one that can generalize
facts and deduce principles therefrom, one that can idealize and build
in the imagination what it would put into material shape or on paper. If
this comparison be true (and the reader is at liberty to bring facts to
contradict it), then Mr. Jefferson could not produce the Declaration for
want of capacity.

The Declaration is the work of a master. It is the work of one with
_great experience_ in the art of composition, one who produced the whole
in the ideal before he touched pen to paper, and one who followed plan
and specifications with unerring precision. It is a work of the most
finished rhetoric, and produced with such skill as to defy adverse
criticism. It shows vast labor and time bestowed upon its execution. In
its mechanism I have never seen its equal in all my reading and study.
It is the most masterly work of genius I ever saw in composition. It
stands alone in the world of letters. There is nothing its equal which
has come down to us from the ages, and I know of no one save Thomas
Paine capable of producing it. That he was a master in the art of
composition, no one can dispute, and he frequently takes pains to give
the principles which reveal his success; here is one of them, to be
found in his Letter to the Abbe Raynal: "To fit the powers of thinking
and the turn of language to the subject, so as to bring out a clear
conclusion that shall hit the point in question, and nothing else, is
the true criterion of writing," See a fine passage on this point in the
introduction to the same letter. Now Jefferson had not the genius to
produce the Declaration.

If we look also at several passages in the Declaration we can only feel
their full force after knowing the previous career of Mr. Paine as
Junius in England. Take for example the two paragraphs, 24 and 25, the
one of the king and the other of the "British brethren." We see in the
one the proud disdain and haughty contempt for the tyrant; in the other
that tender sympathy for the English people, with a sly thrust at the
Scotch, and then the wounded affection which comes from betrayal of
friendship--"the last stab to agonizing affection." And then regathering
himself fr