United States or Nicaragua ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The first President of the United States was, as Carlyle grimly says, "no immeasurable man," and we conceive that Paine had earned the right to criticise even him and his policy. Every person is of course free to hold what opinion he pleases of Paine's writings. The Athenoum critic thinks they have "gone the way of all shams." He is wrong in fact, for they circulate very extensively still.
Only lunatics or worse would credit such a preposterous story. The Athenoum critic alleges that Paine insulted Washington, and was therefore a "thorough-paced rascal." But he did nothing of the kind.
Critics, it is well known, sometimes write as Artemus Ward proposed to lecture on science, "with an imagination untrammeled by the least knowledge of the subject." Let us close this vindication of Paine by citing the estimate of him formed by Walt Whitman, an authority not to be sneered at now even by Athenoum critics.
We are content to let the reader decide between Whitman and the Athenoum critic in their respective estimates of him who wrote, and as we think acted up to it "All the world is my country, and to do good my religion." Christians are perpetually crying that we destroy and never build up.
And he may also be wrong in his literary judgment. William Hazlitt, whose opinion on any subject connected with literature is at least as valuable as an Athenoum critic's, ranked Paine very high as a political writer, and affirmed of his "Rights of Man" that it was "a powerful and explicit reply to Burke."
Word Of The Day