has done the state some service, though they know it not.”  This service, of which the state has continued so obstinately ignorant, consists mainly in having invented filibustering, and in having brought duelling into disgrace by killing Hamilton.  “That was a benefit,” our moralist gravely remarks concerning this last claim to gratitude.  Certainly; just such a benefit as Captain Kidd conferred upon the world; he brought piracy into disgrace by being hanged for it.  As to the invention of filibustering, we are hardly disposed to rank Burr with Fulton and Morse for his valuable discovery; but perhaps the shades of Lopez and De Boulbon, and the living “gray-eyed man of destiny,” will worship him as the founder of their order.

It is impossible to define Mr. Parton’s opinion of his hero.  It is not very clear to himself.  He is inclined to admire him, and is quite sure that he has been harshly dealt with.  In the Preface he intimates that it is his purpose to exhibit Burr’s good qualities,—­for, as he says, “it is the good in a man who goes astray that ought most to alarm and warn his fellow-men.”  The converse of which proposition we suppose the author thinks equally true, and that it is the evil in a man who does not go astray which ought most to delight and attract his fellow-men.  At the end of the volume Mr. Parton makes a summary of Burr’s character,—­says that he was too good for a politician, and not great enough for a statesman,—­that Nature meant him for a schoolmaster,—­that he was a useful Senator, an ideal Vice-President, and would have been a good President,—­and that, if his Mexican expedition had succeeded, he would have run a career similar to that of Napoleon.  We do not dare attack this extraordinary eulogy.  To describe a man as not great enough for a statesman, yet fitted to make a good President, as a natural-born schoolmaster and at the same time a Napoleon, argues a boldness of conception which makes criticism dangerous.

Mr. Parton occasionally assumes an air of impartiality, and mildly expresses his disapprobation of Burr’s vices; but in every instance where those vices were displayed he earnestly defends him.  In the contest with Jefferson, Parton insists that Burr acted honorably; in the duel with Hamilton, Burr was the injured party; in his amours he was not a bad man; so that, although we are told that Burr had faults, we look in vain for any exhibition of them.  In the cases where we have been accustomed to think that his passions led him into crime, he either displayed the strictest virtue, or, at most, sinned in so gentlemanlike a manner, with so much kindness and generosity, as hardly to sin at all.