The authors who have been rash enough to try to tell something about him can no more pick and choose the incidents of his career that will make the most effective "stuff" than they could reduce the phenomena of a cyclone or the aurora borealis to a consistent narrative form.
Thus: One starts to speak of Paine's experiences in Paris, and brings up in New Rochelle; one endeavours to anchor him in Greenwich, only to find oneself trailing his weary but stubborn footsteps in the war! And always and forever, Paine himself persists in crowding out the legitimate sequence of his adventures.

No one can soberly write the story of his life; one can, at best, only achieve a diatribe or an apotheosis! Said he: "The sun needs no inscription to distinguish him from darkness." This quotation might almost serve as a text for the life of Paine, might it not?
And yet--there are people in the world who wear smoked glasses, through which, I imagine, the sun himself looks not unlike a muddy splash of yellow paint upon the heavens! This is a book about Greenwich Village and not a defence of Thomas Paine.

Yet, since the reader has come with me thus far, I am going to take advantage of his courteous attention for just another moment of digression.

Here is my promise: that it shall take up a small, small space.
Small insects sting dangerously; and on occasion, a very trivial and ill-considered word or phrase will cling closer and longer than a serious or thoughtful judgment.

When Theodore Roosevelt called Thomas Paine "a filthy little Atheist" (or was the adjective "dirty"?
I really forget!) he was very young,--only twenty-eight,--and doubtless had accepted his viewpoint of the great reformer-patriot from that "hearsay upon hearsay" against which Paine himself has so urgently warned us.