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LITERARY NOTICES.

History of the Republic of the United States of America, as traced in the Writings of Alexander Hamilton and his Contemporaries.  By John C. HAMILTON Vol.  I. New York:  D. Appleton & Co., Broadway. 1857.

Comic Histories have never been to our taste.  The late Mr. Gilbert a Beckett, we always thought, might have employed his vis comica, or force of fun, better than in linking ludicrous images and incongruous associations with the heroes of ancient and modern times.  The department of Comic Biography, we believe, has received few contributions, if any, from the frolic quills of wicked wags.  The cure, however, of this defect in our literature, if any there be, may be looked upon as begun in the work whose title stands at the head of this notice.  The author, indeed, had not the settled purpose of the facetious writers we have just dispraised, of making game of the subject of his book, no more than he has the wit and cleverness which half redeem their naughtinesses.  The absence of these latter qualities is supplied in his case by the self-complacent good faith in which he puts forth his monstrous assumptions and the stolid assurance with which he maintains them.  But the effect of his labors, as of theirs, is to throw an atmosphere of ludicrous ideas around the memory of a great man, painful to all persons of good taste and correct feelings.

Filial piety is a virtue to which much should be forgiven.  And the son of such a father as Alexander Hamilton might well be pardoned for even an undue estimate of his services, if it were kept within the decent bounds of moderate exaggeration.  But when he undertakes to make his father the incarnation of the Revolution and of the Republic, and to concentrate all the glories of that heroic age in him as the nucleus from which they radiate, he must pardon us, if we think, that, by long contemplation of the object of his filial admiration, his mental sight has become morbid and distorted, and sees things which are not to be seen.  Beginning his book with the assumption that Hamilton was the first to conceive the idea, of “the Union of the People of the United States,”—­an assumption which we can by no means admit, though supported (as we learn from a foot note) by the opinion of Mr. George Ticknor Curtis,—­the author proceeds “to trace in his life and writings the history of the origin and, early policy of this GREAT REPUBLIC.”  Through the whole volume, “THE REPUBLIC” stands rubric over the left hand page, and “HAMILTON” over the right, and the identity of the two is sought to be established from the beginning to the end.  Now, deep as is the sense we entertain of the services of Hamilton to his country, and scarcely less than filial as is the veneration we have been taught from our earliest days to feel for his memory, we must pronounce this pretension to be as absurd and futile in itself as it is unjust and ungenerous to the other great men of that pregnant period.