A thousand passages might be selected from both to show this riding trait of character. The proud, imposing spirit that would dare to undertake the business of a world for the good of mankind, and to tread on the pride of courtiers, and to tell the king, who ruled over the greatest nation on earth, that nature had only intended him for a good-humored fool, is pre-eminently the leading trait in Junius and Paine. No one can mistake it; no one can fail in finding it; no one can help feeling the force of it. It has never been produced in any other man. The world's history has given us but the one example of it. We search in vain for another parallel. And if Mr. Paine did not write Junius, nature produced twins of the same mental type to do the same work for mankind, and then defeated all her arts and gave the lie to all her laws, by exhibiting the one and forever concealing the other. But surely nature can conceal nothing. Her method is to reveal, not to conceal. She writes the character of man on all he touches, and reveals it in the very language he would employ to conceal it. It was this proud spirit which gave Paine that contempt for monarchy which he so often expressed. "I have an aversion to monarchy," he says, "as being too debasing to the dignity of man." This is a language which courtiers could not understand, and they would consider it the vain babbling of a mad-man; but it is the very basis of that government which he labored to establish in America and France. This is also the spirit of Junius when he says with such withering sarcasm: "It may be matter of curious speculation to consider, if an honest man were permitted to approach a king, in what terms he would address himself to his sovereign." And after having gained the ear of the king, when he says: "Let it be imagined, no matter how improbable, that he has spirit enough to bid him speak freely and understanding enough to listen to him with attention. Unacquainted with the vain impertinence of forms, he would deliver his sentiments with _dignity_ and firmness." Here Junius, also, fortified with that proud integrity of character which he held in common with all who would not be enslaved, and which he possessed as the birthright of man, was free to place the dignity of an honest man in antithesis to a weak understanding in a king only supported by the vain impertinence of forms. Paine was too proud to be vain; his pride came up from nature; it was the pride of human worth, and opposed to that vanity of art which always makes pretentions to more worth than nature has conferred. Nature gives us pride, art makes us vain. It was this pride, in opposition to vanity, which Junius expressed in his great battle against the usurpations of government, when he says: "Both liberty and property are precarious unless the possessors have sense and spirit enough to defend them. This is not the language of vanity. If I am a vain man my gratification lies within a narrow circle." That is, "to