ever produced.  I knew him well.  I was in situations to observe and study him.  He argued cases before me while I sat as judge on the bench.  Webster has done the same.  In power of reasoning, Hamilton was the equal of Webster; and more than this can be said of no man.  In creative power, Hamilton was infinitely Webster’s superior, and in this respect he was endowed as God endows the most gifted of our race.  If we call Shakspeare a genius or creator, because he evoked plays and character from the great chaos of thought, Hamilton merits the same appellation; for it was he, more than any other man, who thought out the Constitution of the United States and the details of the Government of the Union; and out of the chaos that existed after the Revolution, raised a fabric, every part of which is instinct with his thought.  I can truly say that hundreds of politicians and statesmen of the day get both the web and woof of their thoughts from Hamilton’s brains.  He, more than any man, did the thinking of the time.

His fooling was as inimitable as his use of passion and logic, and on one occasion he treated Gouverneur Morris, who was his opposing counsel, to such a prolonged attack of raillery that his momentary rival sat with the perspiration pouring from his brow, and was acid for some time after.  During his earlier years of practice, while listening to Chancellor Livingston summing up a case in which eloquence was made to disguise the poverty of the cause, Hamilton scribbled on the margin of his brief:  “Recipe for obtaining good title for ejectment:  two or three void patents, several ex parte surveys, one or two acts of usurpation acquiesced in for the time but afterwards proved such.  Mix well with half a dozen scriptural allusions, some ghosts, fairies, elves, hobgoblins, and a quantum suff. of eloquence.”  Hamilton also originated the practice of preparing “Points,” now in general use.

VIII

Hamilton, after the conclusion of the great libel case in the spring of 1804, returned from Albany to New York to receive honours almost as great, if less vociferous, than those which had hailed him after the momentous Convention of 1788.  Banquets were given in his honour, the bar extolled him, and the large body of his personal friends were triumphant at this new proof of his fecundity and his power over the minds of men.  They were deeply disturbed on another point, however, and several days after his arrival, Troup rode out to The Grange, Hamilton’s country-seat, to remonstrate.

Hamilton, several years since, had bought a large tract of wooded land on Harlem Heights and built him a house on the ridge.  It commanded a view of the city, the Hudson, and the Sound.  The house was spacious and strong, built to withstand the winds of the Atlantic, and to shelter commodiously not only his family, but his many guests.  The garden and the woods were the one hobby of his life, and with