as those which Mr. Jefferson affirmed to be in view, leads us to the belief that, as Burr said, his aim was Mexico. His understanding, rather than his heart, acquits him in our eyes of treason. But when we turn to the history of his trial, we say, that as his guilt was far from being palpable, such was the vindictive spirit with which the President sought his life, that a good man might long hesitate in his choice, were he forced upon the hard alternative of being either Thomas Jefferson or Aaron Burr. The trial of Burr was a spectacle deeply impressive on many accounts. The accused had been but two years before the second officer in the federal government. He had been placed in this, the zenith of his elevation, by the party then in power: by that party, too, he had been hurled from rank and honour with almost unprecedented rapidity; and now, by command of its chief, he stood as a culprit before the bar of his country, to answer for a crime so foul, that accusation only was almost certain infamy. He stood to plead for life. Never before or since has one who filled so exalted a station in our land been arraigned on such a charge. This alone made the spectacle impressive; whatever men may have thought of the individual, no generous mind could withhold a sigh as it dwelt upon the sad picture of fallen greatness. But there was one heart in which no throb of sympathy, no pulsation of regret, was felt. With the busy assiduity of an attorney seeking testimony in a cause, Thomas Jefferson (we would not assert it, but upon the authority of his own letters) by means of his miserable tools, was ransacking the continent for evidence. Forgetful of the dignity which became his station; forgetful of the duty, which, in the event of condemnation might devolve on him, of answering an appeal to him for the executive clemency to the convict; forgetful of the gentlemanly delicacy of feeling which prompted a studied non-interference in the case of a man who had once been his competitor for the high office which he then held, his activity in driving on the prosecution to a conviction, was as notorious as it was disgraceful. We blush for the chief magistrate of our people when we remember that he made himself a partizan in the case, and made the cause his own, not the cause of the nation; we blush when we see him willing to cast the pollution of Executive influence into the pure fountain of justice; and a laugh of scorn will, in spite of us, curl our lip when we read his instructions to counsel to deny this or that case or position to be law, and find him furnishing, forsooth, law arguments wherewith to enlighten John Marshall! We blush, when we read, in the letters which he was sending to the United States attorney, almost daily while the trial was in progress, the language in which he betrays his personal interest in the matter, and the vulgar slang in which he indulges when he speaks of the counsel of Burr; and, above all, his suggestion to have one of them, whom he calls "an unprincipled and impudent federal bull dog," arrested. Shall we move (says he) to commit Luther Martin, as particeps criminis, with Burr? If ever malevolent cowardice sought, without incurring danger, to gratify its long-cherished thirst for revenge, we think we have here an approximation at least to such a case; and (for falsehood and cowardice are sworn companions) we marvel not at the consummate hypocrisy, which in the midst of these letters to counsel, informing them what "we" must do, could write to a friend and say; "against Burr personally, I never had one hostile senti ment." After Burr's acquittal, bankrupt alike in fortune and in fame, he became for four years a wanderer in Europe; and on his return resumed the practice of his profession in NewYork; but public opinion was against him. Men who once knew, now shunned him he had received, upon his descending path, an impulse so strong, that nothing could arrest the impetus which forced him lower and lower, until he reached a hiding-place from men's scorn in the grave. Our task is nearly done. We have sketched the leading incidents in the life of Aaron Burr, not surely from any pleasure to be derived from dwelling on a career of profligacy; but as the professor of anatomy, in giving instruction to his class, is sometimes obliged to deal with subjects made offensive by decay; so in our dissection of the characters of public men, (a duty which with God's help, shall in these pages ever be honestly and fearlesssly performed) we may be obliged, for the instruction of that large class of our young countrymen whose improvement we seek, sometimes to come into contact with specimens so disgusting that, if we could, most gladly would we be excused the loathsome office of exhibition. But God bids successive generations to gather wisdom from those that have gone before them he hath commanded the sons of men to "mark the perfect man, and behold the upright," as he cometh to his peaceful and honoured end: and he bids them note also the fearful instances by which he sometimes illustrates the truth of his declaration, that "the name of the wicked shall rot." We have dwelt upon the life of Aaron Burr, because, to our * Jefferson's Letter to Giles-Correspondence, Vol. IV. p. 74. minds, that life presents a most impressive moral lesson. It speaks with emphatic solemnity to our young countrymen, and especially to those among them who are looking forward to public life. The successive steps by which he trod the path to ruin are plain to the reflecting mind. Reputably descended, born of parents whose piety was better honour than a mere patent of rank; endowed by his Maker with high gifts, and many a lofty trait of character, which needed but the guidance of virtuous principle to have made him one of GOD Almighty's noblemen; Aaron Burr, at the early age of eighteen, deliberately cast behind him the teachings of heaven, and surrendered himself to the grossness of a beastly sensuality. At twenty, already an adept in profligacy, his vice lost him the confidence of Washington; and he repaid the loss with embittered hatred. Thrown, in after-life, into competition with one who was the friend of Washington, resentment gave strength to his ambition; and in seeking to rise, he thought as much of the depression of others as he did of the elevation of himself. Political opposition in him was in part, if not entirely, the indulgence of personal hatred; and hence he rushed to the embrace of that democracy which received him with open arms. Blind to the sagacious foresight of one whose political antipathies were distinct from his personal resentments, he toiled successfully to elevate to power the man who was destined to repay him with persecution. Circumstances unforeseen threw him into accidental competition with that man, whose policy was the cunning of selfishness, and whose friendship was the treachery of deceit. To have been, however undesignedly, a competitor, was to have been an enemy; and with that man, the ruin of an enemy wore the semblance of virtue. Lending, by the faults of his own character, but too much aid to the machinations of him whom he thus placed in a station which increased his powers of injury, he felt the injury in the destruction of that confidence he once enjoyed with his party. Chagrined by a defeat which attested that want of confidence, in an evil moment for the country and for himself he purposed and accomplished the gratification of his revenge in the murder of one whom he hated none the less because Washington had loved him. Followed by the resentment of an outraged and indignant community, he sought, in his desperation to retrieve his broken fortunes and gratify his indomitable ambition, by plans and purposes which only enabled his most subtle foe to heap upon him an accumulation of disgrace, and subject him to the risk of an ignominious death. An exile from his country, he wandered in poverty a stranger in other lands; his and when at last he returned to his own, it was to encounter the harder calamity of being treated as a stranger among countrymen. With the recklessness produced by a present which had no comfort, and a future which promised no hope, he surrendered himself without shame to the grovelling propensities which had formed his first step on the road to ruin, until at last, overcome by disease, in the decay of a worn-out body and the imbecility of a much-abused mind, he lay a shattered wreck of humanity, just entering upon eternity with not enough of man left about him to make a Christian out of. Ruined in fortune and rotten in reputation, thus passed from the busy scene one who might have been a glorious actor in it; and when he was laid in the grave, decency congratulated itself that a nuisance was removed, and good men were glad that God had seen fit to deliver society from the contaminating contact of a festering mass of moral putrefaction. ART. IX.-The Letters of Charles Lamb, with a sketch of his life. By THOMAS NOON TALFOURD. In two volumes. London: Edward Moxon, Dover Street. 1837. THIS is a delightful book, both from the nature of its subject and the manner in which it is treated. Of all contemporaneous men of genius, Charles Lamb is, perhaps, the one whose name awakens the most genial associations, and towards whom the feelings of his readers approach most nearly to the glow of personal attachment. This is to be ascribed, not so much to the greatness as to the peculiarity of his powers. The age has given birth to wiser men than he, to deeper scholars, profounder thinkers-to men of richer imaginations, more extensive resources, greater variety of intellectual accomplishments and better disciplined minds-but none comes so near to the heart as he. Others we admire, reverence, defer to-him we love. We read him with that sort of interest with which we talk to an old friend. No writer since Montaigne, introduces himself so completely to his reader as he. His works are full of an egotism peculiar to himself-not the morbid egotism of Byron, nor the sentimental egotism of Sterne, nor the stately egotism of Gibbon, nor the foolish egotism of Boswell; but an egotism, charming, because natural and unconscious. His writings are the vivid transcripts of the particular moods of feeling which possessed him when he sat down to compose, and they reveal to us his weaknesses and his foibles, his errors and his eccentricities, no less than his gifts, his graces, and his virtues. The present work is the record of the uneventful life of a man of letters, passed in the populous solitude of London, whose days differed as little, one from another, as the several leaves upon the same tree. There was probably never a man who lived to be sixty years old, who had fewer incidents or adventures to remember and record. When we have been told that he was born in London, on the eighteenth day of February, seventeen hundred and seventy-five, was sent to Christ's Hospital School, passed thirty-three years of his life in the capacity of clerk at the India House, was the intimate friend of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey, and that he died in the sixtieth year of his age, and was buried in Edmonton church-yard-we have learned nearly the whole story of his outward life. The true life of such a man is in his mind, in what he said and wrote, not in what happened to him or what he did. This truth Mr. Sergeant Talfourd has had the judgment and the taste to apprehend, and his book is mostly made up of the letters of Lamb; his own labours being confined to furnishing the slight thread of narrative necessary to give them connexion and coherence. The little which he has done, has, however, been done in such a manner as to add a new leaf to the laurels of the author of "Ion." Good taste, good feeling, a love for the man as well as an admiration for the author, a rare sagacity in criticism, and a benevolence in spirit ever ready to see the soul of good in things evil, and to put the best construction upon all doubtful acts—these are the qualifications which he has brought to his task. We have had constant occasion to remark upon the delicacy of his discrimination, and the justness and profoundness of his reflections. What can be more true and more admirably expressed, more full of that which makes up the best and highest style of criticism, than the following observations upon "Rosamond Gray"?— "In his tale, nothing is made out with distinctness, except the rustic piety and grace of the lovely girl and her venerable grandmother, which are pictured with such earnestness and simplicity as might beseem a fragment of the book of Ruth. The villain who lays waste their humble joys is a murky phantom without individuality; the events are obscured by the haze of sentiment which hovers over them, and the narrative gives way to the reflections of the author, who is mingled with the persons of the tale in visionary confusion, and gives to it the character of a sweet but dis |