John Payne

“ There is equal probability that John Cocke, Deputy Recorder of Thetford in 1629, pretty certainly ancestor of Thomas Paine's mother, was related to Richard Cock, of Norwich, author of "English Law, or a Summary Survey of the Household of God upon Earth" (London, 1651) . The author of "The Rights of Man" may therefore be a confutation of his own dictum: "An hereditary governor is as inconsistent as an hereditary author." One Thomas Payne, of the Norfolk County family, was awarded L20 by the Council of State (1650) "for his sufferings by printing a book for the cause of Parliament." ”

“ Paine—Vaughan—Muir—Perry—British Club.
The French Revolution, like a new religion, effaced the feeling of nationality, and led men, partly from a sense of duty to the world, partly from inordinate vanity, to expatriate themselves, or even to plot their country's downfall. Prominent among these was Thomas Paine—in France he spelt his name Payne—who was the only foreigner besides Cloots who sat in the Convention, and who, more fortunate than Cloots, suffered nothing worse than imprisonment. He had twice visited Paris prior to the Revolution, but his previous career need not be related. ”

“ The glad sun rives the sapphire deeps Down to the dim pearl-floor’d abyss Where, cold in death, my lover sleeps; Crowns with soft fire his sea-drench’d hair, Kisses with gold his lips death-pale, Lets down from heaven a golden stair, Whose steps methinks his soul doth scale. ”

“ Is not thy appearance in a neighborhood a signal for all the worthy burghers to bar their windows and put their womankind under lock and key?—Art thou not, in melancholy truth, the most notorious seapegrace in the kingdom? ”

“ Though Time blend with Eternity, Our lives shall never meet again,— Never by gray or purple sea, Never again in heavens of blue, Never in this old earth—ah me! Never, ah never! in the new. For me, he treads the windless ways Among the thick star-diamonds, Where in the middle æther blaze The Golden City’s pearl gate-fronds ”

“ SWEET HOME.
’Mid pleasures and palaces, though we may roam,
Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home;
A charm from the skies seems to hallow us there,
Which, seek through the world, is ne’er met with
elsewhere. ”

“ Kindly, generous and charitable to excess and at the same time a firm, just and far-sighted administrator, he was passionately beloved by the people of Baghdad, whose miseries he spared no pains to alleviate and whose general prosperity may, in no small degree, be attributed to the untiring courage and self-sacrifice with which he was always ready to shield them, to the utmost of his power, from the ferocity and rapacity of his royal master. ”

“ Nothing else in the career of either Grey or Brougham leads us to suppose them capable of the moral baseness of yielding up the helm of state, in an hour of darkness and peril, to reckless and unskilled hands. ”

“ Lady C. Ah, me! I fear, like many other of your flames, it will but end in smoke.—You talk of being desperately in love,—what proof have you ever given?
Roch. What proof? Am I not ready to give the greatest proof a man can offer—to lay down this sweet bachelor life, and commit matrimony for your sake?
Lady C. Well, this last, I must say, coming from a Rochester, is a most convincing proof. I have heard you out, listen now to me. (Rochester bows.) I will propose a bargain.—If, by your ascendancy over the king, you can disgust him with these nocturnal rambles, and bring him back to reason—
Roch. ”

“ Mary. Pot-luck, uncle!
Copp. Ay, in a friendly way, d'ye see? And I don't care if I did, if it were only to see how royalty messed. But, where the deuce is the king to be found? Oh! yonder is a fine gimcrack young gentleman, who, perhaps, can tell us—I'll hail him. Yo-ho! messmate!
(Exit, hallooing after Edward.)
Mary. What a beautiful place this is! But, without content, grandeur is not to be envied. The humble and the good, may be as happy in a cottage as a palace. ”

“ Friend Copp—if you will wait till to-morrow, I'll pay you double the sum.
Copp. Double the sum!!—thunder and lightning! what do you take me for?—Look ye, neighbour, to an honest tar in distress, my house and purse are open—to a jolly tar who wants a caper, and has no coin at hand, drink to-day and pay to-morrow is the word—but to a sharking land lubber, that hoists the colours of a gallant cruiser, to play off the tricks of a pirate, old Copp will show him his match any day. ”

“ Let beneficence and the world say adieu to the glory of the Barmecides. By Allah, O son of Yehya, but for fear of spies and of the Khalif’s eye, which sleeps not, we should compass thy gibbet [like the Kaabeh] and kiss it as men kiss the Sacred Stone!” “On seeing the sword fall on Jaafer,” says Dibil el Khuzaï, “and hearing the Khalif’s crier proclaim vengeance on Yehya, I wept for the world and felt how true it is that the goal of man’s life is the quitting it.” And indeed it would be hard to name a poet of the day who did not tune his lyre to the same sorrowful strain. ”

“ I should perhaps mention here that the system of Arabic prosody is said to have been invented by one Khelil, a grammarian, and to have been suggested to him by the strokes of a blacksmith’s hammer upon an anvil. not the most promising combination of circumstance for the birth of so important a branch of art. ”

“ Feebly, indeed, and through the darkness of night, he says, blew the breeze of hope from the shores of the New Continent of knowledge and power towards him, as from his lonely elevation he eagerly watched for those cheering signals which he knew would sooner or later greet the patient eye of expectant philosophy, though he himself might not be destined to behold them. Those signals, he wrote, must one day come, unless his own faith in the future should prove vain, and men were content to remain intellectual abjects. ”

“ No contemporary historian or poet can name them without breaking out into passionate praise of their nobleness and as passionate lament for their unmerited fate. “Alas for the sons of Bermek,” cries Salih ben Tarif, “and the happy days of their power! With them the world was as a bride; but now it is widowed and bereft of its children.” “The Barmecides,” says Fekhreddin Razi, “were to their time as a plume to the brow, as a crown to the head. The world was requickened under their administration and the empire carried to the highest pinnacle of splendour. ”

“ The Society of the Friends of the People was originally an after-dinner folly, extemporized at the house of a man who afterwards gained an earldom by denouncing it as seditious. Fox discountenanced it, though he did not directly condemn it; but Grey was overborne by the fierce Jacobinism of Lauderdale, and avowed himself the parliamentary mouthpiece of this dangerous agitation. But Pitt, strong in his position, cut the ground from under Grey’s feet by suppressing the agitation with a strong hand. ”

“ The idea of "Captain Copp" constantly trying to sing a song, and never being able to complete it, was conceived by Irving to meet the English taste for broad fun. In the introduction by Payne in the edition of 1824 he refers to the literary friend to whom he is "indebted for invaluable touches."
The work of both authors had as a model, a French play, La Jeunesse de Henri V, by Alexandre Duval (1760-1838) , one of the leading dramatists of France at the time. ”

“ As far as I can judge, from a cursory inspection, the Egyptian and Spanish Arabic poets are less fully represented in the collection than their brethren of Irak, Syria and Arabia, and it is, by the way, a notable fact, and one which tells strongly against Von Hammer’s theory of the Persian origin of the work, that no single extract or translation from Persian verse is, to the best of my belief, known to exist in it. ”

“ Von Hammer’s theory, as soon as advanced, was disputed by the still greater French Orientalist, Silvestre de Sacy, who (whilst allowing the possibility and even probability of the original Arabic compiler having used a slight thread of connecting narrative adapted from the external scheme of the Hezar Efsan, on which to string the immense succession of fictions provided by himself and his successors) definitely establishes the fact that no trace whatever exists of any considerable body of præ-Mohammedan or non-Arabic fiction in the extant texts of the Thousand and One Nights. ”

“ Competent musicians, who are masters of the piano, attracted by the simplicity of the tenor part in most quartets, often take up the Tenor with but little knowledge of the violin. This is a mistake: it is usually found that the Tenor can only be properly played by a practised violinist. The Violin and Tenor make an effective duet; witness the charming works of Haydn, Mozart, and Spohr, and the less known but very artistic and numerous ones of Rolla, by the aid of which any competent violinist will soon become master of the Tenor. Mozart wrote a concerto for Violin, Tenor, and Orchestra. ”

“ In a short, but incredibly active life, he had amassed a fortune that was considerable, even in the midlands where fortunes are made. I do not know what he manufactured, but his business was conducted in Gloucester, and the Overton estate, which he acquired shortly before his death, lay under the shadow of Cotswold, between its escarpment and the isolated hill of Bredon, within twenty miles of that city. Mr. Payne had died of acute pneumonia in a sharp struggle that was in keeping with his strenuous mode of life. Seven months after his death his only child, Arthur, was born. ”

“ By his father too, who is one of the best fencers in Europe, he was improved in gracefulness of attitude—and nature had uncommonly endowed him for the reception of those instructions. Of such means of improvement Master Payne was wholly destitute, for there was not a man that we could hear of in America who was at once capable and willing to instruct him. Self-dependent and self-taught as he must be, we could see no feasible means by which he could evolve his powers, be they what they might, to adequate effect for the stage. ”

“ Thomas Paine has been pursued with falsehood and calumny for more than a hundred years, but his name and fame grow brighter and brighter as the years roll by. Already he is enrolled among the immortals as one of the real saviors of the World. ”

“ George W. Julian, the first Antislavery nominee for Vice-President, one of the founders of the Republican party, and for many years a distinguished leader in Congress, says: "Paine was a perfectly unselfish and incorruptible patriot; he was a philanthropist in the best sense of the word; he was a man of the rarest intelligence and moral courage."
Charles Watts of England says: "Thomas Paine had a generous and affectionate nature, a mind superior to fear and selfish interests; a mind governed by the principles of uniform rectitude and integrity; a mind the same in prosperity and adversity ”

“ Charles Edward Russell: "The soul of Thomas Paine was 'like a star and dwelt apart.' He kept his own self-respect and the integrity of his mind."
"He lived a long, laborious, and useful life. The world is better for his having lived. For the sake of truth he accepted hatred and reproach. He ate the bitter bread of sorrow. His friends were untrue to him because he was true to himself, and true to them. He lost the respect of what is called society, but kept his own. His life is what the world calls a failure, and what history calls success."—Ingersoll. ”

“ Martin K. Schermerhorn: "When our children's children shall celebrate America's second centennial a hundred years from now, they will write in largest letters upon their national banner this sentence which all intelligent American citizens will then enthusiastically recognize and applaud: 'Thomas Paine—the Patriot... of two hundred years ago.'"
Stephen Simpson: "To the genius of Thomas Paine as a popular writer, and to that of George Washington as a prudent, skillful, and consummate general, are the American people indebted for their rights, liberty and independence." ”

“ I am proud to speak the name of one who, in too many memories, lives only as an outcast and Ishmael among men—Thomas Paine. I cannot forget that when all was dark his eye saw a star of hope, his faith heard the tramping of millions of free people yet unborn. ”

“ Payne looked, and in place of the lake he seemed to behold a swimming pool and to sense an atmosphere that was like a drug. He opened the gate and stepped out on the sand prairie. As in moments of crisis, when unseen, unknown forces take a life in hand, he was for the moment like a man in a dream, unconscious of his movements, incapable of intention. He leaned against the gatepost to think. The soft thud-thud of an unseen horse, walking slowly somewhere out upon the prairie, brought him up with a jerk. ”

“ If it don't have no effect, what I've been thinking of is a deputation to the General Manager.”
“She's not a going to manage me,” returned Payne, catching something of the last sentence. “If I'm treated with proper respect I'm a lamb, but if anyone attempts to lord it over me, I'm simply a roaring lion.”
William Henry, ordered back to the tail of his van, made note number two. Trouble brewing, and, in the case of wholesale discharges, a fair chance of honest lads gaining promotion. ”

“ Thomas Paine was the creator of this great Republic. He was the real father of our country; Washington was its foster father. Paine's pen transformed a petty rebellion into a mighty revolution and made a rebel chief the triumphant defender of a new-born nation. Washington's fame is secure. His right to a place in the pantheon of earth's immortals will never be denied. And when the clouds of prejudice are dispelled, as they will be, Paine's name will shine with a splendor unsurpassed, never to be obscured again. ”