Alas! Charles Imlay was faithless; and when Mary returned to England with little Fanny Imlay, alone and broken in spirit, it was bookseller Johnson who befriended her as he had our lonely Blake. Obviously there was much in common between her and Blake. He was with her in her hope for women, and children, and the poor. She had found herself in spite of mistakes, and her character and her works were informed with vital passion. Had Blake been single, and she drawn into friendship with him, she would have become the perfect type of new woman, imaginative, understanding, impassioned, inspired; as it happened, it was into Godwin's arms she fell, and not Blake's, and while Godwin took her in like a wandering dove, and gave her shelter and sympathy, yet the slight chill of his marital deportment and reasoned ways would have hindered her, had she lived, from bringing her fine character to full fruition. Tom Paine presents another type of rebel with whom Blake came into contact. He had already made for himself fast friends and bitter enemies by aiding and abetting the American Rebellion. The thirteen colonies, though irritated by the Stamp Act, were not at once inclined to rebel, and even after Charles Townshend's proposal of tea-duty, South Carolina, Pennsylvania, New York, and Delaware still held back. Paine could wield a powerful pen, and by this means he kept the flame of discontent alive, and urged the States on till Jefferson composed a Declaration of Independence to which the four backward States were brought reluctantly to agree, and on July 4th, 1776, the American United Colonies declared themselves Free and Independent States. After this success Paine felt that his pen was equal to any task. Having returned to England and fallen in with the Godwin set, he of course shared with them in their sympathies for the French Revolution, and in addition declared himself a deist, and set himself, in his _Age of Reason_, to discredit the Bible. It was all very well when he was doing the rough work of fanning rebellion, but he was ludicrously unfit for the fine work of criticizing the Bible. Its poetry and mysticism and manifold wisdom were not even suspected by him. He stolidly read through the sublime chapters of Isaiah, and thought them worse than the production of a schoolboy; and when he came to the stories of the Nativity, which, whether fact or poetry, are marvellously beautiful, he became so grossly indecent that one is bound to relegate him to the vulgarest order of Bible-smashers.