The Declaration is the work of a master. It is the work of one with _great experience_ in the art of composition, one who produced the whole in the ideal before he touched pen to paper, and one who followed plan and specifications with unerring precision. It is a work of the most finished rhetoric, and produced with such skill as to defy adverse criticism. It shows vast labor and time bestowed upon its execution. In its mechanism I have never seen its equal in all my reading and study. It is the most masterly work of genius I ever saw in composition. It stands alone in the world of letters. There is nothing its equal which has come down to us from the ages, and I know of no one save Thomas Paine capable of producing it. That he was a master in the art of composition, no one can dispute, and he frequently takes pains to give the principles which reveal his success; here is one of them, to be found in his Letter to the Abbe Raynal: "To fit the powers of thinking and the turn of language to the subject, so as to bring out a clear conclusion that shall hit the point in question, and nothing else, is the true criterion of writing," See a fine passage on this point in the introduction to the same letter. Now Jefferson had not the genius to produce the Declaration. If we look also at several passages in the Declaration we can only feel their full force after knowing the previous career of Mr. Paine as Junius in England. Take for example the two paragraphs, 24 and 25, the one of the king and the other of the "British brethren." We see in the one the proud disdain and haughty contempt for the tyrant; in the other that tender sympathy for the English people, with a sly thrust at the Scotch, and then the wounded affection which comes from betrayal of friendship--"the last stab to agonizing affection." And then regathering himself from the affliction of a broken heart, he exclaims, "Manly spirit bids us to renounce forever these unfeeling brethren." But _no_, this can not be done, and in the next breath he says, "we must endeavor to forget our former love for them;" and then comes the wail of anguish in the loss of his native country, "We might have been a great and a free people together, but a communication of grandeur and of freedom it seems is below their dignity. Be it so." He now bends beneath the hand of fate and cries out, "I acquiesce in our eternal separation," but persist in denouncing it. This is the very picture of Mr. Paine's own heart. It is a pitch of enthusiasm and anguish which Mr. Jefferson had neither circumstance in his life nor capacity in his soul to work himself up to. It is neither art nor contrivance, it is the recorded beating of his own heart, the sequel to his previous life.