was one of the two foreigners who sat in the Convention; but falling under suspicion during the days of the terror, he was committed to the prison of the Luxembourg and only released upon the fall of Robespierre July 27, 1794. While in prison he wrote a portion of his best known work, the Age of Reason. This appeared in two parts in 1794 and 1795, the manuscript of the first part having been intrusted to Joel Barlow, the American poet, who happened to be in Paris when Paine was sent to prison.

The Age of Reason damaged Paine's reputation in America, where the name of "Tom Paine" became a stench in the nostrils of the godly and a synonym for atheism and blasphemy. His book was denounced from a hundred pulpits, and copies of it were carefully locked away from the sight of "the young," whose religious beliefs it might undermine. It was, in effect, a crude and popular statement of the Deistic argument against Christianity. What the cutting logic and persiflage-the sourire hideux-of Voltaire had done in France, Paine, with coarser materials, essayed to do for the Englishspeaking populations. Deism was in the air of the time; Franklin, Jefferson, Ethan Allen, Joel Barlow, and other prominent Americans were openly or unavowedly deistic. Free thought, somehow, went along with democratic opinions, and was a part of the liberal movement of the age. Paine was a man without reverence, imagination, or religious feeling. He was no scholar, and he was

not troubled by any perception of the deeper and subtler aspects of the questions which he touched. In his examination of the Old and New Testaments, he insisted that the Bible was an imposition and a forgery, full of lies, absurdities, and obscenities. Supernatural Christianity, with all its mysteries and miracles, was a fraud practiced by priests upon the people, and churches were instruments of oppression in the hands of tyrants. This way of accounting for Christianity would not now be accepted by even the most "advanced" thinkers. The contest between skepticism and revelation has long since shifted to other grounds. Both the philosophy and the temper of the Age of Reason belong to the eighteenth century. But Paine's downright pugnacious method of attack was effective with shrewd, half-educated doubters, and in America well-thumbed copies of his book passed from hand to hand in many a rural tavern or store, where the village atheist wrestled in debate with the deacon or the school-master. "When one part of God," exclaims Paine-to give an instance of the method and spirit of his book"is represented as a dying man, and another part called the Holy Ghost, by a flying pigeon, it is impossible that belief can attach itself to suchwild conceits. The book called the Book of Matthew says that the Holy Ghost descended in the shape of a dove. It might as well have said a goose; the creatures are equally harmless, and the one is as much a nonsensical lie as the other."

And again: "What is it the Testament teaches us? to believe that the Almighty committed debauchery with a woman engaged to be married! And the belief of this debauchery is called faith."

When we turn from the political and controversial writings of the Revolution to such lighter literature as existed, we find little that would deserve mention in a more crowded period. The few things in this kind that have kept afloat on the current of time—rari nantes in gurgite vasto—attract attention rather by reason of their fewness than of any special excellence that they have. During the eighteenth century American literature. continued to accommodate itself to changes of taste in the old country. The so-called classical or Augustan writers of the reign of Queen Anne replaced other models of style: the Spectator set the fashion of almost all of our lighter prose, from Franklin's Busybody down to the time of Irving, who perpetuated, the Addisonian tradition later than any English writer. The influence of Locke. of Dr. Johnson, and of the Parliamentary orators has already been mentioned. In poetry the example of Pope was dominant, so that we find, for example, William Livingston, who became governor of New Jersey and a member of the Continental Congress, writing in 1747 a poem on Philosophic Solitude which reproduces the trick of Pope's antitheses and climaxes with the imagery of the Rape of the Lock, and the didactic morality of the Imitations from Horace and the Moral Essays:

"Let ardent heroes seek renown in arms,
Pant after fame and rush to war's alarms;
To shining palaces let fools resort

And dunces cringe to be esteemed at court.
Mine be the pleasure of a rural life,

From noise remote and ignorant of strife,
Far from the painted belle and white-gloved beau,
The lawless masquerade and midnight show;
From ladies, lap-dogs, courtiers, garters, stars,
Fops, fiddlers, tyrants, emperors, and czars."

The most popular poem of the Revolutionary period was John Trumbull's McFingal, published in part at Philadelphia in 1775, and in complete shape at Hartford in 1782. It went through more than thirty editions in America, and was several times reprinted in England. McFingal was a satire in four cantos, directed against the American Loyalists, and modeled quite closely upon Butler's mock heroic poem, Hudibras. As Butler's hero sallies forth to put down May games and bear-baitings, so the tory McFingal goes out against the liberty-poles and bon-fires of the patriots, but is tarred and feathered, and otherwise ill entreated, and finally takes refuge in the camp of General Gage at Boston. The poem is written with smartness and vivacity, attains often to drollery and sometimes to genuine humor. It remains one of the best of American political satires, and unquestionably the most successful of the many imitations of Hudibras, whose manner it follows so closely that some of its lines, which

have passed into currency as proverbs, are generally attribued to Butler. For example:

Or this:

"No man e'er felt the halter draw
With good opinion of the law."

"For any man with half an eye
What stands before him may espy;
But optics sharp it needs, I ween,
To see what is not to be seen."

Trumbull's wit did not spare the vulnerable points of his own countrymen, as in his sharp skit at slavery in the couplet about the newly adopted flag of the Confederation:

"Inscribed with inconsistent types

Of Liberty and thirteen stripes."

Trumbull was one of a group of Connecticut literati, who made much noise in their time as the "Hartford Wits." The other members of the group were Lemuel Hopkins, David Humphreys, Joel Barlow, Elihu Smith, Theodore Dwight, and Richard Alsop. Trumbull, Humphreys, and Barlow had formed a friendship and a kind of literary partnership at Yale, where they were contemporaries of each other and of Timothy Dwight. During the war they served in the army in various capacities, and at its close they found themselves again together for a few years at Hartford, where they formed a club that met weekly for social and literary purposes. Their presence lent a sort of