ble, wore the bonnet rouge, exchanged fraternal embraces, recited mad odes at dinners, and played tricks fantastic enough to plunge the whole hierarchy of heaven into tears,—or laughter. "If angels have any fun in them," says Horace Walpole, "how we must divert them!" Naturally, amid this popular excitation, "The Rights of Man" and "The Age of Reason" were the best-read books of the day, and people talked about them with that fierce fervour which forbade doubt or denial.
Now Elizabeth Drinker was never fervent. Hers was that critical attitude which unconsciously, but inevitably, weighs, measures, and preserves a finely adjusted mental balance. She read "The Age of Reason," and she read "The Rights of Man," and then she read Addison's "Evidences of the Christian Religion," by way of putting her mind in order, and then she sat down and wrote:—
"Those who are capable of much wickedness are, if their minds take a right turn, capable of much good; and we must allow that Tom Paine has the knack of writing, or putting his thoughts and words into method.
