- lectors and retailers of puns, poetry, and
jokes, scrap-rakers, and other pioneers of literature, were to a man democratic. In the jacobin clubs literary men possessed great influence, and many who were, or fancied themselves literary men, here expected, that if a revolution should take place in England, they should have the direction of affairs. But the work of Thomas Paine, which now made its appearance, most completely unhinged loyalty and patriotism in the breasts of great numbers of professed votaries of literature, and many others who made no claims to learning; and the effect of that noted production contributed much more powerfully to wean our hero from approbation of revolutionary doctrines, than the deepest wisdom of Burke himself. Perhaps, indeed, there never was a writer who more completely attained the art of imposing and impressing non-
