Not a chord of faith, or love, or hope was left untouched. The very faults of the composition, which the dilettanti have picked out, were effective to men who had seen Paine on the march, and knew these things were written in sleepless intervals of unwearied labors. He speaks of what Joan of Arc did in "the fourteenth century," and exclaims: "Would that heaven might inspire some Jersey maid to spirit up her countrymen, and save her fair fellow sufferers from ravage and ravishment!" Joan was born in 1410, but Paine had no cyclopaedia in his knapsack. The literary musket reaches its mark. The pamphlet was never surpassed for true eloquence--that is, for the power that carries its point. With skilful illustration of lofty principles by significant details, all summed with simplicity and sympathy, three of the most miserable weeks ever endured by men were raised into epical dignity. The wives, daughters, mothers, sisters, seemed stretching out appealing hands against the mythically monstrous Hessians. The great commander, previously pointed to as "a mind that can even flourish upon care," presently saw his dispirited soldiers beaming with hope, and bounding to the onset,--their watchword: _These are the times that try men's souls_! /Trenton was won, the Hessians captured, and a New Year broke for America on the morrow of that Christmas Day, 1776.* * Paine's enemy, Cheetham, durst not, in the face of Washington's expression of his "lively sense of the importance of your [Paine's] works," challenge well known facts, and must needs partly confess them: "The number was read in the camp, to every corporal's guard, and in the army and out of it had more than the intended effect. The convention of New York, reduced by dispersion, occasioned by alarm, to nine members, was rallied and reanimated. Militiamen who, already tired of the war, were straggling from the army, returned. Hope succeeded to despair, cheerfulness to gloom, and firmness to irresolution. To the confidence which it inspired may be attributed much of the brilliant little affair which in the same month followed at Trenton." Even Oldys is somewhat impressed by Paine's courage: "The Congress fled. All were dismayed. Not so our author." Paine's Trenton musket had hardly cooled, or the pen of his first _Crisis_ dried, before he began to write another. It appeared about four weeks after the battle and is addressed to Lord Howe. The Thetford mechanic has some pride in confronting this English lord who had offered the Americans mercy. "Your lordship, I find, has now commenced author, and published a Proclamation; I have published a Crisis." The rumors of his being a hireling scribe, or gaining wealth by his publications, made it necessary for Paine to speak of himself at the conclusion: