latter led Lord Eldon in most instances to adjudicate nothing but the case before him; but Marshall remembered that while he owed to the suitors the decision of the case, he owed to society the establishment of the principle. His mind naturally tended, not to suggestion and speculation, but to the determination of opinion and the closing of doubts. On the bench he always recollected that he was not merely a lawyer, and much less a legal essayist; he was conscious of an official duty and an official authority; and considered that questions might be discussed elsewhere, but came to be settled by him. The dignity with which these duties were discharged was not the least admirable part of the display. It was Wisdom on the seat of Power, pronouncing the decrees of Justice. There was in this extraordinary man an unusual combination of the capacity of apprehending truth, with the ability to demonstrate and make it palpable to others. They often exist together in unequal degrees. Lord Mansfield's power of luminous explication was so surpassing that one might almost say that he made others perceive what he did not understand himself; but the numerous instances in which his decisions have been directly overthrown by his successors, and the still greater number of cases in which his opinions have been silently departed from, compel a belief that his judgment was not of the truest kind. Lord Eldon's judicial sagacity was a species of inspiration; but he seemed to be unable not only to convince others, but even to certify himself of the correctness of his own greatest and wisest determinations. But Judge Marshall's sense appeared to be at once both instinctive and analytical: his logic extended as far as his perception: he had no propositions in his thoughts which he could not resolve into their axioms. Truth came to him as a revelation, and from him as a demonstration. His mind was more than the faculty of vision; it was a body of light, which irradiated the sub distinct to every other eye as it was to its own. The mental integrity of this illustrious man was not the least important element of his greatness. Those qualities of vanity, fondness for display, the love of effect, the solicitation of applause, sensibility to opinions, which are the immoralities of intellect, never attached to that stainless essence of pure reaHe seemed to men to be a passionless intelligence; susceptible to no feeling but the constant love of right; subject to no affection but a polarity toward truth. Political and legal sense are so distinct from one another as almost to be irreconcilable in the same mind. The latter is a mere course of deduction from premises; the other calls into exercise the highest order of perceptive faculties, and that quick felicity of intuition which flashes to its conclusions by a species of mental sympathy rather than by any conscious process of argumentation. The one requires that the susceptibility of the judg-ject to which it was directed, and rendered it as ment should be kept exquisitely alive to every suggestion of the practical, so as to catch and follow the insensible reasonings of life, rather than to reason itself: the other demands the exclusion of every thing not rigorously exact, and the concentration of the whole consciousness of the mind in kindling implicit truth into formal principles. The wonder, in Judge Marshall's case, was to see these two almost inconsistent faculties, in quality so matchless and in development so magnificent, harmonized and united in his marvellous intelligence. We beheld him pass from one to the other department without confusing their nature, and without perplexing his own understanding. When he approached a question of constitutional jurisprudence, we saw the lawyer expand into the legislator; and in returning to a narrower sphere, pause from the creative glow of statesmanship, and descend from intercourse with the great conceptions and great feelings by which nations are guided and society is advanced, to submit his faculties with docility to the yoke of legal forms, and with impassible calmness to thread the tangled intricacies of forensic technicalities. son. -Chief Justice Marshall's History of the Colonies planted by the English on the Continent of North America, from their Settlement to the Commencement of the War which terminated in their Independence, was first printed as an introductory volume to the Life of Washington, but in 1824 was published separately. The Life of Washington, originally in five volumes, in 1832 was republished in two. Both these works had been revised with great care. A volume entitled The Writings of John Marshall upon the Constitution, was published in Boston in 1839, under the direction of Judge Story. ALEXANDER HAMILTON. [Born 1757. Died 1804.] IN the summer of 1772 the leeward West India islands were desolated by a hurricane. While its effects were still visible, and men were looking fearfully into the skies, Thomas Hewes's St. Christopher's Gazette was distributed, with an account of the calamity written with such singular ability that when it reached Saint Croix, where it was dated, the governor and chief men of the place set themselves to work to discover its author. It was traced to a youth-in the counting-house of Nicholas Cruger, a merchant there-named ALEXANDER HAMILTON, born some fifteen years before in the island of Nevis; whose father was a decayed Scottish gentleman, and whose mother was of the good Huguenot stock of France. It was a happy day for our young author: a lad who could write in this way should not spend his life in casting up accounts: it was at once determined to send him to New York to complete his education. While on his way, the ship which bore him was on fire, dangerously, but not fatally, and in the month of October, in that year, he landed at Boston. Francis Barber, afterward a colonel, and a brave man in several battles, was at this time principal of a grammar school in Elizabethtown, New Jersey: a school of good repute, for Brockholst Livingston and Jonathan Dayton were among his pupils; and hither came the young West Indian to be prepared for college: a handsome youth, erect, graceful, eagle-eyed, and wise in conversation as a man. Before the end of 1773 he had finished his preliminary studies, and with honest Hercules Mulligan, tailor, afterward member of the revolutionary committee, and secret corre spondent of the commander-in-chief, he proceeded to Princeton, to inquire of Dr. Witherspoon if he could enter Nassau Hall with the privilege of passing from class to class as fast as he advanced in scholarship. The president was sorry, but the laws of the institution would not permit. He was more successful in New York. In King's College he might sue for a degree whenever he could 12 The show the title of sufficient learning. chrysales of great men were in the college, but there was only one Alexander Hamilton there, and this soon became manifest. In the debating club he controlled every thing by his acuteness and eloquence, and his room-mate was awed, night and morning, by the fervid passion of his prayers. He wrote hymns and burlesqued the royal printer's leaders; he was pious and punctilious; ambitious and gay. The days of trouble were already come. Macdougal had been imprisoned for his appeal to the betrayed inhabitants of the colony; and the liberty tree, coated with hoops which no garrison axe could cut, had been the rallying point for numerous assemblies of the people. All the proceedings were watched by the young collegian, who walked night and morning under the large trees in Batteau street for hours, with a thoughtful face. Every week he read the honest Post Boy, mercenary Hugh Gaines's neutral Mercury, and the unscrupulous "Brussels Gazette" of well-fed James Rivington, printer to the king. On the sixth of July, 1774, the longremembered great meeting in the fields was held, and as the hot sun was going down, and the multitude was about to separate, a youth of diminutive form and a pale intellectual face, ascended the stand, recounted the oppressions of the government, insisted on the duty of resistance, and foretold that the waves of rebellion, sparkling with fire, would wash back to England the wrecks of her wealth and power from the New World. He closed amid breathless silence, and the air was filled with the tumult of wonder and applause. So, at seventeen years of age, Alexander Hamilton commenced his glorious public life. The Episcopal clergy, all through the country, were opposed to liberty. The king was the head of the church. Doctors Chandler, Cooper, Inglis, Seabury, Wilkins, and others, had already written largely in defence of the ministry, and they now redoubled their efforts. With his master, President Myles H2 89 Cooper, Hamilton had tried his lance through Holt's paper, and when Seabury and Wilkins attacked the Congress in their Free Thoughts and Congress Canvassed,-distributed by the Tories all through the colonies, and tarred, feathered, and nailed to the pillories by the people-a defence appeared from the student, anonymous, like the pamphlets of the priests, and remarkable for its directness, ingenuity, and spirit. The clerical combatants published A View of the Controversy, and within a month Hamilton produced a rejoinder, in a pamphlet of nearly a hundred pages. It was more able than the first; grasped great principles with a master hand; and by a course of argument equally original and forcible, vindicated the Whigs, while its author seemed to look clearly into the distant future and see our state and policy. The Whigs received these pamphlets as text-books, and they were attributed to the maturest intellects of the party. "How absurd," said Dr. Myles Cooper, "to suppose that they were written by so young a man as Hamilton!" But the truth came out, and the gallant Marinus Willett says, the "Vindicator of Congress," as he was from that time called, "became our oracle." From this period Hamilton was a ❝ citizen." All his thoughts, all his energies were given to the country. I shall not attempt to trace with particularity his history, except as it is connected with the press. His next publication was Remarks on the Quebec Bill, in two numbers. His style was more highly polished, his views were more statesmanlike and profound. In 1775 he entered a military company, studied tactics, and was engaged in the first act of armed opposition to the ministry. At the passage of the Raritan, in the memorable retreat through New Jersey, Washington observed with admiration the courage and skill of a youthful artillery officer, and ordered his aid-de-camp, Fitzgerald, to ascertain who he was, and to bring him to head-quarters at the first halt of the army. In the evening of that day the founder of the republic had his first interview with the most illustrious of her statesmen. Hamı.ton continued in the family of the commander-in-chief until 1781, and from the beginning to the end, to use Washington's own language, was his "principal and most confidential aid." The embarrassments of the treasury and consequent sufferings of the army led Hamilton to the study of finance, and in 1779, in private and anonymous communications to Robert Morris, he proposed a great financial scheme for the country, in which, rising above all the crude systems of that age, and pointing to a combination of public with private credit as the basis of his plan, he led the way to the establishment of the first American bank. In the following spring, when he was but twenty-three years of age, he wrote his celebrated letter to Mr. Duane on the state of the nation, in which he suggests the national convention to form a constitution, and the mode of recommending it to the people, "in sensible and popular writings," which he afterward pursued in the Federalist. In December, 1780, he was married to a daughter of General Schuyler, and on the first of March, 1781, he retired from the military family of Washington; with the disinterestedness which characterized all his actions, though without resources, resigning his pay, and retaining his commission only that he might have the power, should there be occasion, still to serve his country in the field. His brilliant conduct at Yorktown closed his military career. His quick apprehension and solid judgment enabled him, with almost unprecedented rapidity, to prepare for admission to the bar. He made his first appearance in the courts in 1782, and in the summer of the same year was elected by the legislature of New York to the congress of the confederation. The war at an end, patriotism and enthusiasm seemed to have died. All was apathy and irresolution. The Congress of 1782 was full of weak men and cowards. "The more I see," wrote Hamilton, "the more reason I find for those who love this country to weep over its blindness." His far-reaching sagacity, his solemn regard for justice, and his eloquence soon imparted a new tone to that body. He was always a member and often the chairman of the committees which had in charge the subjects of greatest importance. His reports are evidences of his extraordinary abilities, and of the correctness of the judg ment expressed at this period by Washington, that "no one exceeded him in probity and sterling virtue.” At the end of the session he entered with characteristic ardour upon the duties of his profession, in the city of New York; but his mind was still occupied with extensive schemes for the general benefit, and no man exerted so wide and powerful an influence with his pen. In 1786 he was a member of the New York assembly, and in 1787 was one of the three delegates to the convention for the formation of a federal constitution, which he had proposed in his letter on the state of the nation in 1779. No one will question the justice of the opinion expressed by Gaizot respecting his efforts in this celebrated body, when he says, that "there is not one element of order, strength, or durability in the constitution which he did not powerfully contribute to introduce into the scheme and cause to be adopted." With Madison, whose labours in the convention had been of similar importance, and John Jay, one of our purest and ablest statesmen and jurists, upon its adjournment he commenced a series of essays, under the signature of Publius, upon the necessity of the union to the prosperity of the people, the insufficiency of the articles of confederation to maintain it, and the indispensableness of a government organized upon principles and clothed with powers at least equal to those granted in the one proposed. These essays have since been known under the name of The Federalist. They constitute one of the most profound and lucid treatises on politics that has ever been written. Hamilton was the author of nearly three-fourths of them, and admirable for various qualities as are those of his illustrious associates, his are easily distinguished by their superior comprehensiveness, practicalness, originality, and condensed and polished diction. In 1788 he was a member of the New York convention to which the constitution was submitted, and it was owing to his luminous arguments and persuasive eloquence, as it was to Madison's in Virginia, that it was accepted. Upon the organization of the government, Washington indicated his estimation of the talents and integrity of Hamilton by appointing him secretary of the treasury. This office required the vigorous exercise of all his powers; and his reports of plans for the restoration of public credit, on the protection and encouragement of manufactures, on the necessity and the constitutionality of a national bank, and on the establishment of a mint, would alone have given him the reputation of being one of the most consummate statesmen who have ever lived. The plans which he proposed were adopted by Congress almost without alteration. When he entered upon the duties of his office the government had neither credit nor money, and the resources of the country were unknown; when he retired, at the end of five years, the fiscal condition of no people was better, or more clearly understood. Mr. Gallatin has said that secretaries of the treasury have since enjoyed a sinecure, the genius and labours of Hamilton having created and arranged every thing that was necessary for the perfect and easy discharge of their duties. While Hamilton was in the treasury the French revolution was at its height, and native demagogues and alien emissaries were busy in efforts to embroil us in foreign war. Hamilton advised the proclamation of neutrality and the mission of Mr. Jay, the two acts which distinguished the external policy of the first administration; and he defended the proclamation under the signatures of No Jacobin and Pacificus, and Jay's treaty under that of Camillus, in essays which at the time had a controlling influence on the public mind, and which are still regarded as among the most profound commentaries which have appeared on the principles of international law and policy to which they had relation. sessor. A false economy in this country has made almost every high office a burden to its posHamilton's increasing family warned him that his public must in some degree be sacrificed to his private obligations. When he resigned his seat in the cabinet and resumed his profession, his door was thronged with clients, and he seemed on the high road to fortune. The conduct of France meanwhile made every patriot a sentinel, and when her depredations upon our commerce and insults to our ministers left no alternative, under the signature of Titus Manlius, as with a bugle whose familiar sound marshalled to arms, he roused the people to resistance. The recommendations which he made were adopted by Congress, and when the provisional army was organized, Washington accepted the chief command upon condition that his favourite old associate in the field and the council should be his first officer. Upon the death of Washington in 1799, Hamilton became lieutenant-general, and when the army was disbanded he returned to the bar. The remainder of his life was marked by few incidents, and the melancholy circumstances of its close, at the end of nearly half a century, are still familiar to the people. He was murdered by Aaron Burr, at Weehawken, near the city of New York, on the eleventh of June, 1804. There has been but one other instance of such profound and universal mourning in the United States. Whatever differences of opinion may have divided from him some of his countrymen, there was no one to question that he was a man of extraordinary abilities, virtue, and independence. His assassin, then in the second office of the republic, and the favourite of a powerful party, became a fugitive and a vagabond. Hamilton was not faultless; but his errors have been greatly exaggerated, and no intelligent man needs be told that Madison was the only one among his distinguished political adversaries whose private character approached his in purity. His public life was without a stain. He was undoubtedly the greatest statesman of the eighteenth century. "He must be classed," says Guizot, "among the men who have best known the vital principles and fundamental conditions of a government worthy of its name and mission." Consider ing the activity of his life, and that so much of it was passed in the military service, affording but little leisure and opportunity for historical studies, the extent and fulness of his information is astonishing. There was never a statesman whose views were more explicit and comprehensive, and they seem to be results of the closest inductive reasoning from the experience of other nations. But however deliberately formed and firmly founded were his opinions, whenever he discovered that they could not be maintained, he cheerfully acquiesced in the plans which were preferred by his associates, and exerted his abilities to procure their adoption. It is remarkable that a man who on all subjects was so frank and fearless should have been so ill understood. His principles have been systematically perverted and misrepresented, not only without any sort of authority, but in opposition to positive declarations in his writings, speeches, and conversations. He did indeed have fears that the constitution would not ultimately prove to be practicable; that "if we inclined too much to democracy we should soon shoot into a monarchy;" but no one had more dread of such a result,-no one was more anxious for the greatest free| dom to the citizen that was compatible with efficiency in the government. It is an interesting fact, that the most anti-democratic proposition which he made in the federal convention that for choosing a president and senate to hold their offices during good behaviour was supported by the democratic states of Pennsylvania and Virginia, and voted for by Mr. Madison. His views on this and other points were essentially modified during the progress of the debates, and he finally voted to limit the presidential term to three years. He however frankly admitted, when questioned, that he had favored the idea of the tenure of good behaviour. "My reasons," he said to General Lewis, "were an exclusion, so far as possible, of the influence of executive patronage in the choice of a chief magistrate, and a desire to avoid the incalculable mischief which must result from the too frequent elections of that officer. You and I, my friend," he continued, "may not live to see the day; but most assuredly it will come, when every vital interest of the state will be merged in the all-absorbing question of who shall be NEXT PRESIDENT." The prophecy has become history. It became so earlier than he thought, for both he and his friend saw it fulfilled in the controversy of 1800. In every page of the works of Hamilton we discover an original, vigorous, and practical understanding, informed with various and profound knowledge. But few of his speeches were reported, and even these very imperfectly; but we have traditions of his eloquence, which represent it as wonderfully winning and persuasive. Indeed it is evident from its known effects that he was a debater of the very first class. He thought clearly and rapidly, had a ready command of language, and addressed himself solely to the |