Walter Savage Landor:
"Few dared such homely truths to tell,
Or wrote our English half so well."
Zells Encyclopedia: "He early distinguished himself by his literary
abilities."
Cyclopedia of American Literature: "The merits of Paine's style as a
prose writer are very great."
B. F. Underwood: "Thomas Paine's style as a writer, in some respects,
has never been equaled. Every sentence that he wrote was suffused with
the light of his own luminous mind, and stamped with his own intense
individuality of character."
"There is a peculiar originality in his style of thought and expression,
his diction is not vulgar or illiterate, but nervous, simple and
scientific.... Paine, like the young Spartan warrior, went into the
field stripped bare to the last thread of prudent conventional disguise;
and thus not only fixed the gaze of men upon his intrepid singularity,
but exhibited the vigor of his faculties in full play."--_Rev. George
Croly_.
John Lendrum: "The style, manner, and language of the author is singular
and fascinating."
"He was a magnificent writer of the English language."--_Henry Frank_.
"He is the best English writer we know."--_Gilbert Vale_.
"Ease, fluidity, grace, imagination, energy, earnestness, mark his
style."--_Elbert Hubbard_.
"Paine is the first American writer who has a literary style, and we
have not had so many since but that you may count them on the fingers of
one hand."--_Ibid._
L. Carroll Judson: "His intellectual powers suddenly burst into a blaze
of light."
John Horne Tooke: "You are like Jove coming down upon us in a shower of
gold."
"The man who coined the intellectual gold of the Eighteenth Century was
Thomas Paine."--_L. K. Washburn_.
Ebenezer Elliott: "Paine is the greatest master of metaphor I have ever
read."
"He was not only master of metaphor, he was master of principles. He
imparted life to great ideas."--_George Jacob Holyoake._
"The keenness of his intellect was matched by the brilliancy of his
imagination. He stated a truth in a way that men could see, hear,
and feel it. Take the following epigram: 'To argue with a man who
has renounced the use of Reason is like administering medicine to the
dead.'"--_George W. Foote_.
Prof. William Smyth: "Paine is a writer to be numbered with those few
who are so supereminently fitted to address the great mass of mankind."
Dr. Charles Botta: "No writer, perhaps, ever possessed in a higher
degree the art of moving and guiding the public at his will."
Elroy McKendree Avery: "No writer ever had a greater influence upon the
events of his own time than he."
"He threw the charms of poetry over the statue of reason," says Stephen
Simpson, "and made converts to liberty as if a power of fascination
presided over his pen."
John Adolphus: "He took with great judgment, a correct aim at the
feelings and prejudices of those whom he intended to influence."
Hezekiah Butterworth: "He had a surprising power of direct forcible
argument."
William Hazlitt: "Paine affected to reduce things to first principles,
to announce self-evident truths."
W. J. Fox, M. P.: "A keen and powerful intellect, and a philosophical
mind going to the foundation of every question; bringing first
principles forward in a luminous and impressive manner.
Robert James Mackintosh: "His strong coarse sense and bold dogmatism
conveyed in an instinctively popular style made Paine a dangerous enemy
always."
M. Gerard: "You know too well the prodigious effects produced by the
writings of this celebrated personage."
Madame Roland: "The boldness of his conceptions, the originality of his
style, the striking truths which he boldly throws out in the midst of
those whom they offend, must necessarily have produced great effects."
Edward C. Reichwald: "He was an intellectual gladiator who won his
victories upon the field of thought."
Boston Herald: "There is no better illustration in all history than
exists in Paine's writings of Bulwer's aphorism, 'The pen is mightier
than the sword.'"
Hon. John J. Lentz, M. C.: "The pen of the author of 'Common Sense' and
the 'Crisis' did more to liberate the Colonies than did the sword of the
commander in chief of the Colonial armies."
Prof. William Denton: "The pen of Paine accomplished more for American
liberty than the sword of Washington."
General Lee of Revolutionary fame says: "The pen of Thomas Paine did
more to achieve our Independence than did the sword of Washington." Joel
Barlow, one of the most popular literary men of his time, a chaplain
in the American Revolution and a fellow-worker of Paine for political
liberty, both in England and France, says: "We may venture to say,
without fear of contradiction, that the great American cause owed as
much to the pen of Paine as to the sword of Washington." Even Paine's
vilest calumniator, Cheetham, makes this admission: "His pen was an
appendage to the army as necessary and as formidable as its cannon."
Reuben Post Halleck, L.L. D.: "Some have said that the pen of Thomas
Paine was worth more to the cause of liberty than twenty thousand
men. In the darkest hours he inspired the colonists with hope and
enthusiasm... He had an almost Shakespearean intuition of what would
appeal to the exigencies of each case."
"The real man back of the American Revolution was the man who had the
ideas and not the man behind the guns.... Paine fought with the weapon
of the future, and he was one of the very first that made it powerful.
Paine's weapon was the pen, not the sword. Washington conquered small
groups of men that had been living twenty or thirty years, but Thomas
Paine conquered the prejudices of thousands of years."--_Herbert N.
Casson._
Thomas Jefferson: "These two persons [Lord Bolingbroke and Thomas Paine]
differed remarkably in the style of their writings, each leaving a model
of what is most perfect in both extremes of the simple' and the sublime.
No writer has exceeded Paine in ease and familiarity of style, in
perspicuity of expression, happiness of elucidation, and in simple and
unassuming language."