The familiars of Franklin have shown that his face in his old age changed in a very marked degree. He was in his seventy-eighth or his seventy-ninth year when he sat for Houdon in 1784-85. Many of the features of the Franklin cast as here reproduced—the long square chin, the sinking just beneath the under lip, the shape of the nose, and the formation of the cheekbones—are strongly preserved in the face of one of his great-granddaughters now living in Philadelphia. Leigh Hunt in his _Autobiography_ said that Franklin and Thomas Paine were frequently guests at the house of his maternal grandfather in Philadelphia when his mother was a girl. She remembered them both distinctly; and in her old age she told her son that while she had great affection and admiration for Franklin, Paine “had a countenance that inspired her with terror.” Hunt was inclined to attribute this in a great measure to Paine’s political and religious views, both of them naturally obnoxious and shocking to the daughter of a Pennsylvania Tory and rigid churchman. Concerning the physical as well as the moral traits of the author of the _Age of Reason_, there seems to have been great diversity of opinion. To paraphrase the speech of Griffith in _Henry VIII._ concerning Wolsey, He was uncleanly and sour to them that loved him not, but to those men that sought him, sweet and fragrant as summer. His friend and biographer, Clio Rickman, who considered him “a very superior character to Washington,” gave strong testimony to his personal attractions and tidiness of dress; while James Cheetham, his biographer and not his friend, told a very different and not a very pleasant story, in which soap and water—or their absence—play an important part. The former, according to Cheetham, was never employed externally by Paine, and the latter was very rarely, if ever, internally applied. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [Illustration: THOMAS PAINE] ------------------------------------------------------------------------