in the Electoral College were equal, it is notorious that this equality was simply the result of their being supported on the same ticket,—­the former for the office of President, and the latter for that of Vice-President.  Mr. Parton says, that, in the House of Representatives, Burr would have been elected on the first ballot, if a majority would have sufficed; and that Mr. Jefferson never received more than fifty-one votes in a House of one hundred and six members.  Had he taken the trouble to examine Gales’s “Annals of Congress” for 1799-1801, he would have found that the House consisted of one hundred and four members, two seats being vacant; and that on the first ballot Jefferson received fifty-five votes, a majority of six.  We are several times told that Robert R. Livingston was one of the framers of the Constitution.  Mr. Livingston was not a member of the Constitutional Convention; the only person of the name in that body was William Livingston, Governor of New Jersey.—­Mr. Parton comes into conflict with other writers upon matters affecting his hero, as to which he would have done well if he had given his authority.  Matthew L. Davis, Burr’s first biographer and intimate friend, says that Burr’s grandfather was a German; Parton, speaking of the family at the time of the birth of Burr’s father, says that it was Puritan and had flourished in New England for three generations.  Mr. Parton makes Burr a witness of a dramatic interview between Mrs. Arnold and Mrs. Prevost shortly after the discovery of Arnold’s treason, the particulars of which Davis says Burr obtained from the latter lady after she became his wife.—­Our author is not consistent in his own statements.  Upon one page he describes Mrs. Prevost, about the time of her marriage, as “the beautiful Mrs. Prevost”; a few pages farther on he says she was “not beautiful, being past her prime.”  He informs us that it is the fashion to underrate Jefferson, that the polite circles and writers of the country have never sympathized with him,—­and in the very same paragraph he remarks that “Thomas Jefferson has been for fifty years the victim of incessant eulogy.”

This carelessness in reciting facts is associated with a certain confusion of mind.  Mr. Parton does not appear to have the power of distinguishing between conflicting statements of the same thing.  He describes Hamilton as honest and generous, and then accuses him of malignity and dishonorable intrigue.  He says that Wilkinson, at that time a general in the United States service, may have thought of hastening the dissolution of the Union “without being in any sense a traitor.”  How an officer can meditate the destruction of a government which he has sworn to protect, and not be in any sense of the word a traitor, will puzzle minds not educated in what the author calls “the Burr school.”  But the most curious exhibition which Mr. Parton makes of this mental and moral confusion occurs in a passage where he attempts to prove his assertion, that “Burr