You have been told that he was a pauper, that he died in wretchedness and want. Those who told you this were certainly mistaken. The estate presented to him by New York, in consideration of his Revolutionary services, was valued at $30,000, and the greater portion of this was remaining at his death. It is true that during his long and useful career he was many times in straitened circumstances; but this was the result, not of improvidence, or reckless expenditure, but of the devotion of his life to the cause of humanity instead of the accumulation of wealth. But what if he had died poor? Is poverty a crime? Yes, were this true, is it a thing of which to boast, that in a Christian city, within the sound of forty church-bells, an old man was suffered to lie neglected and alone, racked by the pangs of hunger and disease, piteously pleading for a crust of bread, or a cup of cold water to cool his parched and fevered tongue; and do you mean to tell us that Christian charity the while stood by unmoved, mocked his sufferings, and damned him when he died? You have been told that he was a drunkard. A baser slander was never uttered. No human being ever saw Thomas Paine intoxicated. He was one of the most temperate of men. All of his neighbors and acquaintances indignantly denied the truth of this imputation. Gilbert Vale tells us that he knew more than twenty persons who were intimately acquainted with him and not one of whom ever saw him intoxicated. The proprietor of the house in New York, a respectable inn at which Paine boarded in his later years, says that of all his guests he was the most temperate. But supposing that he was a drunkard. Is drunkenness so rare as to secure for its victims an immortal notoriety? Are there no living drunkards for these omnivorous creatures to devour, that, like hyenas, they must dig into a drunkard's grave to fill their empty maws?