Meanwhile he was being elected an honorary member of colleges and societies of arts and letters, and persecuted by portrait painters and sculptors.  Every honour, public and private, was thrust upon him, and each new victory was attended by a public banquet and a burst of popular applause.  He was apparently invulnerable, confounding his opponents and enemies without effort.  Never had there been such a conquering hero; even the Virginian trio began to wonder uneasily if he were but mortal, if he were not under some mighty and invisible protection.  As for the Federalists, they waxed in enthusiasm and devotion.  His career was at its zenith.  No man in the United States was—­nor has been since—­so loved and so hated, both in public and in private life.  Even Washington’s career had not been more triumphant, and hardly so remarkable; for he was an American born, had always had a larger measure of popular approval, and never had discovered the faculty of raising such bitter and powerful enemies.  Nor had he won an extraordinary reputation until he was long past Hamilton’s present age.  Certainly he had never exhibited such unhuman precocity.

But although Hamilton had, by this time, extancy to suffice any man, and was hunted to his very lair by society, he had no thought of resting on his labours.  He by no means regarded himself as a demi-god, nor the country as able to take care of itself.  He prepared, and sent to Congress in rapid succession, his Reports on Estimates for Receipts and Expenditures for 1791-92, on Loans, on Duties, on Spirits, on Additional Supplies for 1792, on Remission of Duties, and on the Public Debt.

Nor did his labours for the year confine itself to reports.  On August 4th, his patience with the scurrilities of Freneau’s Gazette came to an end, and he published in Fenno’s journal the first of a series of papers that Jefferson, in the hush of Monticello, read with the sensations of those forefathers who sat on a pan of live coals for the amusement of Indian warriors.  Hamilton was thorough or nothing.  He had held himself in as long as could be expected of any mortal less perfected in his self-government than George Washington:  but when, finally, he was not only stung to fury by the constant and systematic calumnies of Jefferson’s slanting art, but fearful for the permanence of his measures, in the gradual unsettling of the public mind, he took off his coat; and Jefferson knew that the first engagement of the final battle had begun in earnest, that the finish would be the retirement of one or other from the Cabinet.

Hamilton began by mathematically demonstrating that Freneau was the tool of Jefferson, imported and suborned for the purpose of depressing the national authority, and exposed the absurdity of the denials of both.  When he had finished dealing with this proposition, its day for being a subject of animated debate was over.  He then laid before the public certain facts in the career of Jefferson with which they were