5. Mr. Paine says: "The favor of Dr. Franklin's _friendship_ I possessed in England [and _friendship_ with Mr. Paine means _time to prove it_], and my introduction to this part of the world was through his _patronage_." Patronage means to aid or promote a design. This _design_, and this _friendship_ formed upon which it was founded, would take some few years with both of these men, for they were both secretive, reserved, and noncommittal, slow in forming attachments, and extremely cautious in the selection of _friends_. "The first foundation of friendship," says Junius, "is not the power of conferring benefits, but the _equality_ with which they are received and may be returned." Mr. Paine now makes application to be restored to the office from which he was dismissed. On his petition was written: "JULY 4TH, 1766; to be restored on a proper vacancy." The FOURTH OF JULY is ominous. Great events are in store for this young man within the next ten years. He quits the society of the learned and the halls of learning, and goes down at the most hopeful and ambitious period of life into this "inferior office of the revenue" to serve for the "petty pittance of less than fifty pounds a year." Does he go there to satisfy his taste for learning, or to get rich? No; but to reach the object of his ambition. He goes there to spy out the meanness, the corruption, the villainy, the abandoned profligacy of the British Government. The British Government has now a masked enemy who is coming in and going out at the nation's doors, not a spy upon her liberties, but her villainies, a foe to the one and a friend to the other. But he has not forsaken his studies, he is just entering upon them. Taking up English history he makes it a study, which becomes the history of the civilized world, for it reaches out into Spain, France, Austria, Prussia, Russia, America, India, and Rome. Mr. Paine followed its lines into all countries. He also made a study of her laws and the principles of her constitution, and read the French commentators thereon, at the same time he had an eye to politics and the personal history of her living public men. For three years and a half, together with his public duties, he labored to lay a foundation for a long and active literary life. Do you ask how I know this? I answer, because when he came to America he was thus accomplished, and when he went into the excise office he was not.