"On this celebrated publication ['Common Sense'], which has received the testimony of praise from the wise and learned of different nations, we need only remark (for the merit of every work should be judged by its effect) that it gave spirit and resolution to the Americans, who were then wavering and undetermined, to assert their rights, and inspired a decisive energy into their counsels: we may therefore venture to say, without fear of contradiction, that the great American cause owed as much to the pen of Paine as to the sword of Washington."* * And yet--such was the power of theological intimidation-- even heretical Barlow could find no place for Paine in his _Columbiad_(1807). Edmund Randolph, our first Attorney-General, who had been on Washington's staff in the beginning of the war, and conducted much of his correspondence, ascribed independence primarily to George III., but next to "Thomas Paine, an Englishman by birth, and possessing an imagination which happily combined political topics, poured forth in a style hitherto unknown on this side of the Atlantic, from the ease with which it insinuated itself into the hearts of the people who were unlearned, or of the learned."* This is from a devout churchman, writing after Paine's death. Paine's malignant biographer, Cheetham (1809), is constrained to say of "Common Sense": "Speaking a language which the colonists had felt but not thought, its popularity, terrible in its consequences to the parent country, was unexampled in the history of the press."** * Randolph's "History" (MS.), a possession of the Virginia Historical Society, has been confided to my editorial care for publication. ** See also the historians, Ramsay (Rev., i., p. 336, London, 1793), Gordon (Rev., ii., p. 78, New York, 1794), Bryant and Gay (U. S., iii., p. 471, New York, 1879).