Burr, even with the incentive of poverty, would have sunk to such ignominy, no one who knows the open history of her short life will believe; but the father, whose idol she was, insulted her and stained her memory, too depraved and warped to understand nobility in anyone, least of all in one of his own blood.  In the study of lost souls Burr has appealed to many analysts, and by no one has been made so attractive as by Harriet Beecher Stowe; who, knowing naught by experience of men of the world, either idealized them as interesting villains or transformed them into beasts.  In Burr she saw the fallen angel, and bedewed him with many Christian tears.  But I doubt if Burr, the inner and real Burr, had far to fall.  His visible divergence from first conditions was as striking as, no doubt, it was natural.  As the grandson of Jonathan Edwards, the son of the Reverend Aaron Burr, and reared by relatives of that same morbid, hideous, unhuman school of early New England theology, it only needed a wayward nature in addition to brain and spirit to send him flying on his own tangent as soon as he was old enough to think.  After that his congenital selfishness did the rest.  For a time he climbed the hill of prizes very steadily, taking, once in a way, a flight, swift as an arrow:  in addition to great ability at the bar, and a cunning which rose to the dignity of a talent, he was handsome, magnetic, well-bred, and polished, studied women with the precision of a vivisectionist, assumed emotions and impulses he could not feel with such dexterity that even men yielded to his fascination until they plumbed him; had in fact many of the fleeting kindly instincts to which every mortal is subject who is made of flesh and blood, or comes of a stock that has been bred to certain ideals.  Every wretch has a modicum of good in him, and in spite of the preponderance of evil in Burr, had he been born under kindly Southern skies with a gold spoon in his mouth, if, when ambitions developed, he had had but to stretch out his hand to pluck the prizes of life, instead of exercising the basest talents of his brain to overreach more fortunate men, why it is possible that his nature might not have hardened into a glacier:  its visible third dazzling and symmetrical, its deadly bulk skulking below the surface of the waters which divided the two parts of him from his victims; might have died in the chaste reclusion of an ancestral four-poster, beneficiaries at his side.  But that immalleable mind lacked the strong fibre of logic and foresight—­which is all that moral force amounts to—­that lifts a man triumphant above his worst temptations; and he paid the bitter and hideous penalty in a poverty, loneliness, and living death that would have moved the theologians of his blood to the uneasy suspicion that punishment is of this earth, a logical sequence of foolish and short-sighted acts.  Both men and women are allowed a great latitude in this world; they have little to complain of.  It is only when