"You say, also, that you found your own liquors during the time you boarded with me; but you should have said, 'I found only a small part of the liquor I drank during my stay with you; this part I purchased of John Fellows, which was a demijohn of brandy containing four gallons, and this did not serve me three weeks.' This can be proved, and I mean not to say anything that I cannot prove; for I hold truth as a precious jewel. It is a well-known fact, that you drank one quart of brandy per day, at my expense, during the different times that you have boarded with me, the demijohn above mentioned excepted, and the last fourteen weeks you were sick. Is not this a supply of liquor for dinner and supper?" This chosen witness in behalf of Paine, closes his letter, which is full of loathsome descriptions of Paine's manner of life, as follows: "Now, sir, I think I have drawn a complete por- trait of your character; yet to enter upon every minutiae would be to give a history of your life, and to develop the fallacious mask of hypocrisy and de- ception under which you have acted in your political as well as moral capacity of life." (Signed) "William Carver." Carver had the same opinion of Paine to his dying day. When an old man, and an Infidel of the Paine 502 type and habits, he was visited by the Rev. E. F. Hatfield, D.D., of this city, who writes to us of his interview with Carver, under date of Sept. 27, 1877: "I conversed with him nearly an hour. I took special pains to learn from him all that I could about Paine, whose landlord he had been for eighteen months. He spoke of him as a base and shameless drunkard, utterly destitute of moral principle. His denunciations of the man were perfectly fearful, and fully confirmed, in my apprehension, all that had been written of Paine's immorality and repulsiveness." Cheetham's Life of Paine, which was published the year that he died, and which has passed through several editions (we have three of them now before us) describes a man lost to all moral sensibility and to all sense of decency, a habitual drunkard, and it is simply incredible that a book should have appeared so soon after the death of its subject and should have been so frequently republished without being at once refuted, if the testimony were not substantially true. Many years later, when it was found necessary to bolster up the reputation of Paine, Cheetham's Memoirs were called a pack of lies. If only one- tenth part of what he publishes circumstantially in his volume, as facts in regard to Paine, were true, all that has been written against him in later years does 503 not begin to set forth the degraded character of the man's life. And with all that has been written on the subject we see no good reason to doubt the sub- stantial accuracy of Cheetham's portrait of the man whom he knew so well. Dr. J. W. Francis, well-known as an eminent phy- sician, of this city, in his Reminiscences of New York, says of Paine: