In 1808 he went to Europe to obtain aid for his Mexican expedition.  While in England, he made another display of his adroitness and boldness in falsehood.  The English government became suspicious of him; whereupon he had the hardihood to claim, that, although he had borne arms against Great Britain and had held office in an independent state, he was still a British subject.  Mr. Parton says, that this “was an amusing instance of Burr’s lawyerlike audacity.”  Less partial judges will probably find a harsher term to apply to it.

After his return to this country, Burr resumed his profession in New York, but never regained his former position at the bar.  The standard of legal acquirements was higher than it had been in his youth, and the obloquy which rested upon him excluded him from the respectable departments of practice.  During all this time, by far the longest period of his professional life, he never displayed any signal ability.  His society was shunned,—­or sought only by a few personal admirers, or by the profligate and the curious.  When seventy-eight years of age, he wheedled Madame Jumel, an eccentric and wealthy widow, into a marriage.  On the bridal trip he obtained possession of some of her property, and squandered it in an idle speculation.  A continuance of such practices led to a separation, and his wife afterwards made application for a divorce, upon a charge which Mr. Parton says is now known to have been false, but which we have reason to believe was true, and which was so disgusting that we cannot even hint at it.

It is our duty to notice one chapter in this book, which, more than anything else it contains, has given it notoriety.  We refer to its defence of, or, to speak more mildly, its apology for, Burr’s libertinism.  All the faults of the author which we have had occasion to notice, examples of which are scattered through the volume, are concentrated in these few pages,—­his inconsistency, his inaccuracy, his disposition to draw inferences from facts which they directly contradict, and to rely on evidence which has nothing to do with the case in hand.  He argues at great length upon the assumption, that Burr’s correspondence with women was unfit for publication, and then, in contradiction to Burr’s own positive declaration, asserts that there were “no letters necessarily criminating ladies.”  To prove this, he publishes two letters, one of which is an apology, written by Burr in his seventy-fourth year, for having addressed a young woman in an improper manner, and the other is a letter from a female, couched in language much warmer than an innocent woman could use.  Mr. Parton attacks Davis because that writer stated that Burr left his correspondence to be disposed of by him, and eulogizes his hero because he ordered that the letters should be burned.  To establish this position, he quotes Burr’s will, which directed Davis “to destroy, or to deliver to all persons interested, such letters, as may, in