amine with freedom what we think the grievous faults of the works before us; but we shall never find in them faults of simulation, nor consider their author a hypocrite. Mr. Davis, to our eyes, fails to paint Aaron Burr in his true colors; but he does not use wrong ones. His picture wants tone and depth, as the artists say, to make it true and lasting. The reason of the deficiency, not perhaps suspected by the author himself, is yet obvious enough to any other person. The hero and his biographer sympathized personally and politically through life; the consequence of which was, that familiarity which breeds indifference to the less glaring characteristics of conduct neither moral nor patriotic, which would not have been entertained or felt by a mind more fresh in the exercise of its powers of discrimination. Perhaps no stronger illustration of this could be furnished, than by the apparently trifling circumstance of the text already quoted on the titlepage. A mind differently constituted from that of our author would hardly have failed to perceive the singular unfitness of assuming the attitude of the unprincipled Antony, haranguing over the body of a man, who, however great he might have been in other respects, was certainly as unprincipled a politician as himself.

We are informed, that the "Life of Burr " has enjoyed pretty extensive popularity; and, so far as the author may have benefited thereby, we are glad of it. But the reading public in the United States does not appear to us likely to be benefitted at all in the same proportion; and it is on this account, and from no ill will to the author, that we propose to treat his work. A lax custom of construing public conduct has often been considered as the fault of the people of this country. And it would go far towards establishing the truth of the charge, if those, who profess to notice and to scrutinize the character of literary works that appear among us, suffer such as this one to pass even in silence into the confidence of the community. During thirty years of the most eventful portion of our history, Aaron Burr acted no very undistinguished part in public affairs. At one moment he rose so high as nearly to touch the loftiest official seat which the people are called upon to fill; and at another he fell so low as to become isolated among his fellow-beings. How came this great change about? Mr. Davis tries to prove, that it was owing to persecution. We believe the cause was in the man.

No

example has yet occurred in the United States, half so striking as this, of the adequate punishment, by the popular voice, of unbridled, irregular, public ambition and private profligacy; and it is greatly to be wished, that its effect upon the aspiring youth of the future, as well as the grown-up gladiators of the present time, may not be weakened or broken by injudicious palliation, or the interposition of excessive moral obtuseness.

We mean, in the first place, to remark upon the singular inability or unwillingness of the author to call things by their right names, the effect of which in his present work often is, to describe some qualities of his hero, which deserve reprehension, exactly as if they did him honor. We need not go far for a striking example. We are told in the beginning, that Aaron Burr, when a child about four years of age, ran away from home, and was not found until the third or fourth day afterwards. Well! what merit or propriety was there in that, unless, indeed, the boy was so cruelly treated as to be in fear of his life? But Mr. Davis does not pretend that he had any such justification. According to him, the cause of his "departure" (that is the exact word) was “a misunderstanding with his preceptor." A misunderstanding between a child four years old, not yet versed in A, B, C, and his preceptor, who was probably pressing the said letters uncomfortably upon his attention! What became of the boy during the two or three days of his absence, we are not informed; but we suppose that in his case, as in that of most other wilful children, his stomach brought him to. We should, in our simplicity, have inferred from the story only that Burr was headstrong and passionate, if our author had not informed us, that "it indicated, at a tender age, that fearlessness of mind and determination to rely upon himself, which were characteristics stamped upon every subsequent act of his life." Verily we should never have thought it, if we had not been told so.

But to speak more in earnest, what shall be said of the moral acuteness of an author who begins a work by calling the reproof, which an instructor gives to a scholar, "an occasion of misunderstanding" between them, and the running away of the latter in a fit of passion, "a departure," and who finds, in such incidents, fearlessness of mind and a determination to self-reliance? A little of the discipline, which, though out of fashion in the present highly advanced

condition of things, made many a useful citizen at that day, would, in our humble opinion, have gone far to correct such heroic tendencies, and, by doing so, might very possibly have saved the man from cherishing the errors of the boy. If we have any right notion of what fearlessness of mind and selfreliance are, we should go to look for them in that moral cultivation of riper years which produce the death of a Socrates, or the life of a Luther, and not in the passionate whimsies of an infant, or a boy. For it seems that the experiment of running away, already mentioned, was not the only one, that Burr made in early life. Mr. Davis shall tell us about the second in his own way.

"When about ten years old, Aaron evinced a desire to make a voyage to sea; and, with this object in view, ran away from his uncle Edwards and came to the city of New York. He entered on board an outward bound vessel as cabin boy. He was, however, pursued by his guardian, and his place of retreat discovered. Young Burr, one day, while busily employed, perceived his uncle coming down the wharf, and immediately ran up the shrouds and clambered to the topgallantmast head. Here he remained, and peremptorily refused to come down, or be taken down, until all the preliminaries of a treaty of peace were agreed upon. To the doctrine of unconditional submission he never gave his assent."— Vol. 1. p. 26.

It would have been better for him, say we, if he had. For he would not then have been the character in after life, which he proved to be. Unconditional submission to virtuous and considerate parents or guardians never injured the greatest patriots known in history, and would perhaps, in the present instance, have made Burr what he was not without it, a man of principle. But it would appear as if the grandson of Jonathan Edwards was destined to be a striking monument to after times of the abuse of the power of "the will." And he was moreover destined to have a biographer, who would record this abuse as if it was a virtue. Who ever heard before of using the language of diplomacy in the description of the conduct of a refractory boy? "Prelimina ries of a treaty of peace," forsooth! Had his uncle Edwards thought as we do, the negotiation would not have been of many minutes, and would have ended by demanding a categorical answer. For when a youth is perched upon the top of a mast, we do not conceive him in the best possible

situation to dissent from the doctrine of unconditional submission. Breakfast times and dinner times will come round, and make themselves forcibly remembered by growing boys, be their fearlessness of mind and self-reliance what they may. If Burr had been allowed to pass a little time in sober reflection upon this precise view of the case, we think it would have done him good, and saved a couple of very bad paragraphs in his biography.

Nothing more need be said, we trust, to prove the justice of our principal objection to the present work, a grievous deficiency in its moral tone. We can hardly expect, that the more difficult delineation of later life will be correct, when such enormous mistakes are made in describing the simple actions of youth. Had Mr. Davis laid his foundation well, had he traced in the uncorrected errors of the boy, as shown in the examples already cited, in these cases of foolhardy contempt of wise and prudent but overkind counsellors, the seeds of those passions which hurried the man into desperate and unprincipled enterprises, that marked his later years with disgrace, and caused him to descend to the grave a solitary being, unpitied and unmourned, we should on our part have had a much higher opinion of his own moral perspicacity, and have assumed a different tone towards his book. As it is, we simply fulfil a duty incumbent upon us. We hold many of the prevailing notions about education to be bad enough in all conscience; but to tell the rising generation of American citizens, already not too diffident of the infallibility of their judgment, that disobedience at four years of age is a sign of greatness, passes a little beyond any thing it has been our fortune yet to meet with. Dogberry would call it "flat burglary as ever was committed."

Let us, however, dismiss the accessory, for the sake of trying the principal, and proceed to consider the character of Aaron Burr himself, as it comes out in the course of these volumes. The fearless and self-relying mind, which drove the boy of four years old upon the world in consequence of "a misunderstanding" with his tutor, and which sent him. six years later up to the mast-head, there to practise diplomacy upon his guardian and protector, formed for itself in advanced life an estimate of the importance of the relative duties of man quite in unison with these specimens of its early career. There is consistency in perversion, if there is nothVOL. XLIX. No. 104.

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ing else. We are told by Mr. Davis, without a comment or any indication of surprise, that he found his friend, when reflecting upon the course of his past life, far more tenacious of his military than of his professional, political, or moral character; the order in which the terms are used being, it is presumed, significant of the relative importance in which he esteemed them. Colonel Burr was doubtless justified in the conjecture, that he deserved more praise as a soldier than as any thing else. Perhaps he was right in estimating his law to be better than his politics, his politics to be better than his morals, and in saying nothing at all about his religion, which was in truth a cipher, if not a negative quantity. But we want to know what we are to think of a man, who is willing to come before the world, and claim praise of any kind whatsoever upon such recommendations? And what can we say of a biographer, who, though he only "comes to bury Cæsar, and not to praise him," entirely forgets to remark upon that mental obliquity in his hero, which places the duties of life in a ratio exactly the inverse of that which any ordinary moral code (not to speak here of the Christian doctrine) would have established? We censure Mr. Davis, not so much for exposing, as he does, so barely the nakedness of his hero, as for apparently being unconscious all the while that he is doing it.

Aaron Burr was doubtless a very remarkable man. Without being positively great, he might, nevertheless, had he lived in a more corrupt age, have made himself appear so. In thinking of him as he shows himself in the present work, we cannot help recurring to the words of Sallust, when he describes the character of Catiline ; " Fuit magnâ vi animi, sed ingenio malo pravoque ; . . . . . corpus patiens inediæ, algoris, vigiliæ supra quam cuique credibile est (this he proved in his march to Quebec with Arnold); animus audax, subdolus, varius, cujuslibet rei simulator ac dissimulator, alieni appetens, sui profusus (this he manifested in his Mexican project); ardens in cupiditatibus: satis eloquentiæ, sapientiæ parum ; vastus animus immoderata, incredibilia nimis alta semper cupiebat." We doubt most about the vast mind; but, after all, it may be as fair to infer, that it existed in the one case from the acknowledged fear of it entertained by Washington and Jefferson, as we certainly do in the other only from the same kind of apprehension, though in greater force, felt by