“Oh!” says he, “what a pity people should be so prejudiced!” One of the most extraordinary properties belonging to Mr. Paine is the power of retaining everything he has written during his life. He can repeat word for word every sentence in his “Common Sense”--“Rights of Man”--“Age of Reason” and others. This I attribute first to the unparalleled slowness with which he composes every passage he writes, and secondly to his dislike of reading other books than his own. Wonderful and productive as his mechanical genius is, he assured me he never has read anything on this subject. This he told me when showing me one day the beautiful models of two bridges he had devised. These models exhibit an extraordinary degree of skill and taste. They are wrought with extreme delicacy, entirely by his own hands. The longest is nearly four feet long, the iron work, the chains and every other article belonging to it were forged and manufactured by himself. It is intended to be a model for a bridge to span the Delaware extending 480 feet, with a single arch. The other is to be erected over a lesser river (whose name indeed I have forgotten), and is likewise a single arch of his own workmanship, excepting the chains, which instead of iron are cut out of paste-board, by the fair hands of his correspondent, “Little Corner of the World.” He was offered £3000 sterling for those models, but has refused it. He intends to dispose of them to the American Government. The iron bars, I noticed in the corner of his room, are also forged by himself, and as the model of a new description of crane. He put them together and exhibited to me the power of a lever in a surprising degree. It would require the leisure and the memory of James Boswell himself to relate in detail the conversations I had while in Paris with Thomas Paine, or the opinions and anecdotes he recounted. I shall therefore only conclude this account of him with a few words, respecting his acquaintance with Bonaparte. When the hero of Italy had returned to Paris, in order to take the command of that “_Army of England_” (whose left wing he afterwards conducted to the burning sands of Egypt instead of the Valley of Thames) he called on Mr. Paine and invited him to dinner. In the course of his rapturous ecstasies, he declared that a statue of gold ought to be erected to him _in every city in the universe_; he also assured Paine that he (Bonaparte) always slept with a copy of the “Rights of Man” under his pillow, and conjured him to honour him with his counsel and advice. [Sidenote: BONAPARTE AND PAINE]