There is a scarcity of facts, a painful obscurity connected with that part of Mr. Paine's life before he removed to America. In fact, history has given him to the world, as almost beginning life on his arrival at Philadelphia, near the close of the year 1774. At this time, in the full stature of manhood, a little less than forty years of age, we find him without a personal history, without any events in life sufficient to predicate his after life upon. Can the great life to come rest on nothing? How came that mighty mind so fully stored with history, so deeply analytic, so skilled in literature and science, so perfect in the art of expressing ideas, so highly disciplined and finely equipped, ready to do battle against kings and ministers and in behalf of human rights? Whence came that mighty pen, which has often been acknowledged to have done more for human freedom than the sword of Washington? Why this dumb silence of history? There comes to us no thought of Mr. Paine worth recording prior to this time. The proud and imposing superstructure stands on a basis fit and substantial, but it rises out of the depths of mystery. And what little we do know of him prior to this time, aside from the great fact of his birth, is only a series of minor facts, with great blanks not even capable of being filled up by the imagination. When a lad he went to school, but how long he went, or with what proficiency he studied, nobody knows. At sixteen he went aboard a privateer, but how long he served, or what made him quit the service, nobody knows. At twenty-seven he enters the employ of the English government as an exciseman, but was dismissed in a little over a year, nobody knows why. He now teaches school in London a year, but nobody knows with what success, or what were his accomplishments. He now quits London and letters, and the society of the learned, to return to the same petty office from which he had been dismissed, and for the trifling salary of less than fifty pounds a year. This office he now holds eight years more. Only a solitary ray of light illuminates this long period, when in the full tide of life. The chronicler renders it insignificant by a single dash of the pen. It is closed with another dismissal and dismal mystery. He now forever separates from his wife upon _amicable terms_, nobody knows why. During their after lives they neither of them marry, and never speak disrespectfully of each other. He leaves her all the property, and often sends her money during his after life. This obscure and twice dismissed English exciseman, it is said, now goes to talk with Benjamin Franklin, minister at the court of St. James, for several of the colonies; and, by what means nobody knows, obtains letters of the highest commendation, as an introduction to America, from her greatest and most honored citizen. A few months afterward Benjamin Franklin places in the hands of Mr. Paine important documents, for him