Three years afterwards Thomas visited England, where he kept good company and was very usefully employed engineering, for which excellent pursuit he would appear to have had great natural aptitude.  Blackfriars Bridge had just tumbled down, and it was Paine’s laudable ambition to build its successor in iron.  But the Bastille fell down as well as Blackfriars Bridge, and was too much for Paine.  As Mr. Conway beautifully puts it:  ’But again the Cause arose before him; he must part from all—­patent interests, literary leisure, fine society—­and take the hand of Liberty undowered, but as yet unstained.  He must beat his bridge-iron into a key that shall unlock the British Bastille, whose walls he sees steadily closing around the people.’  ’Miching mallecho—­this means mischief;’ and so it proved.

Burke is responsible for the Rights of Man.  This splendid sentimentalist published his Reflections on the Revolution in France in November, 1790.  Paine immediately sat down in the Angel, Islington, and began his reply.  He was not unqualified to answer Burke; he had fought a good fight between the years 1775 and 1784.  Mr. Conway has some ground for his epigram, ’where Burke had dabbled, Paine had dived.’  There is nothing in the Rights of Man which would now frighten, though some of its expressions might still shock, a lady-in-waiting; but to profess Republicanism in 1791 was no joke, and the book was proclaimed and Paine prosecuted.  Acting upon the advice of William Blake (the truly sublime), Paine escaped to France, where he was elected by three departments to a seat in the Convention, and in that Convention he sat from September, 1792, to December, 1793, when he was found quarters in the Luxembourg Prison.

This invitation to foreigners to take part in the conduct of the French Revolution was surely one of the oddest things that ever happened, but Paine thought it natural enough so far, at least, as he was concerned.  He could not speak a word of French, and all his harangues had to be translated and read to the Convention by a secretary, whilst Thomas stood smirking in the Tribune.  His behaviour throughout was most creditable to him.  He acted with the Girondists, and strongly opposed and voted against the murder of the King.  His notion of a revolution was one by pamphlet, and he shrank from deeds of blood.  His whole position was false and ridiculous.  He really counted for nothing.  The members of the Convention grew tired of his doctrinaire harangues, which, in fact, bored them not a little; but they respected his enthusiasm and the part he had played in America, whither they would gladly he had returned.  Who put him in prison is a mystery.  Mr. Conway thinks it was the American Minister in Paris, Gouverneur Morris.  He escaped the guillotine, and was set free after ten months’ confinement.

All this time Washington had not moved a finger in behalf of the author of Common-sense and The Crisis.  Amongst Paine’s papers this epigram was found: