tinue themselves kings, princes, nobles, privileged classes, -everything became good, everything just; all was legitimate. They organized for the necessities of the struggle, and spread abroad in the world, a kind of moral ambuscade against freedom, which Ferdinand put in action at Palermo, Antonelli at Rome, Schwartzenberg at Milan and at Pesth, and, still later, the men of December, those wolves of the state, at Paris."

ART. III.-The Lives and Times of the Chief Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States. By HENRY FLANDERS. First Series: John Jay, John Rutledge. Philadelphia: Lippincott, Grambo, & Co. 1855. 8vo. pp. 645.

It is to Roger North, in his Lives of his illustrious brethren, that we are indebted for one of the most discriminating and satisfactory elucidations existing in our language, of the plan upon which the biography of a great man should be built. He very justly compares the biographer's labors to those of a portrait-painter, whose works would be held as naught, were he to omit presenting upon his canvas the blemishes as well as the beauties of his subject, and who is held by the rules of his art to a strict accountability in transferring the living features of his original to a mute immortality. True it is, that a Vandyke or a Sir Joshua may excel in that delicate flattery, and that rare aptitude of conception and of touch, which unite to invest a form with the attributes of a hero of romance, or the airy lightness and grace of a being of another sphere; but this, so far from militating against our proposition, is but confirmatory of it. With all their power, these great artists have never dared to lose sight of the primary object. To make a pleasing picture was not more their aim than to make a good likeness. Every one who recollects - and who does not?- that superb passage in which Scott renders from the involuntary lips of Cromwell an extorted tribute to the Flemish brush that painted Charles the First, will comprehend our meaning. And it is to a like eminence of art that the biographer should bend his aspirations; nor

neglect, for the pretence of an unnatural pre-eminence above his fellows, to give us those real traits of character which constitute the distinguishing marks of the man. "If the history of a life," says honest Roger, "hangs altogether upon great importances, such as concern the church and state, and drops the peculiar economy and private conduct of the person that gives title to the work, it may be a history, and a very good one, but of anything rather than that person's life."

To

Never were words spoken more apposite than these, and never has a rule been more generally disregarded. It appears to have become a cardinal principle with almost every biog. rapher, to consider his hero less as a human being than as an ill-used demigod, whom the jealousy or blindness of his time had cheated of his due honors. In the execution of his task, the writer seems to clothe himself with the properties of an avenging Nemesis, resolute to compel the recognition of those merits to which mankind has hitherto been insensible. the truly great there is nothing more degrading than this enforced association with that which is ignoble; that which, in itself mean, shows more meanly than ever in comparison with the giants by whom it stands. "Pigmies are pigmies still, though perched on Alps"; and though it often happens that the identical means by which the impostor is brought into notice become at once the monument of his downfall, though he soar like Icarus, only to be whirled

"From high,

To grinning Scorn a sacrifice,

And bitter Infamy,"

yet it is not the less a wrong done to those who have earned our veneration, to permit the sanctuary of their fame to be polluted by such a "midnight crew."

There is, however, a certain class of pretenders to greatness, who claim, and to whom we willingly concede, a disgusting precedence; who, by their mischievous example, may have already accomplished much harm to public morals and to public taste. Were it merely to strip empty folly of its tinsel, we would hardly turn aside. It struts its brief hour in the sun, and ere night is forgotten. We never heard that any one was seriously oppressed by the glory, living or posthu

mous, of Timothy Dexter, or "the great Twalmley, the inventor of the celebrated smoothing-iron." But when, with Folly, Vice strives for superiority in the breast of him who holds up his own picture for our admiration, it is high time, we think, to enter a protest. The land has been plagued with autobiographies, where characters conspicuous neither for public merit nor for private worth are with venal eagerness obtruded upon the public attention. Deeds which a person of any sensibility should blush to have committed are unhesitatingly brought forward by their perpetrator to give a zest to his pages, a point to his tale. That, in the pursuit of gain, a man should incur the risk of being sent to gaol or to Coventry, is, unhappily, no solecism in human nature; but that he should, for the sake of a further pittance, proclaim his own infamy, argues a strange degree of moral abasement. Such a man is the true Yahoo of the race.

Nor is it always the lot even of a man really worthy of high praise to meet his just deserts. He is as often injured as benefited by the unjust system of indiscriminate eulogy to which we have already alluded. His success is often attributed to those opposing qualities, distorted in representation to the semblance of virtues, in whose very despite he succeeded. To find a chronicler who, with a full sense of the merits of that career which forms the burden of his strain, is not blind to its blemishes, who beneath the Julian laurel perceives the baldness of the naked skull, is not the fortune of all the heroes who have flourished since the days of Agamemnon. It is a gratification as rare as welcome to find that faculty so well displayed in the volume before us, where are brought together two characters alike eminent for public services, yet differing toto cœlo upon many questions of public duty and policy.

The historian of the Chief Justices of the United States has undertaken one of the noblest tasks ever afforded to the pen of man. To no page of our national career can the mind recur with such unalloyed satisfaction. The annals of no other land offer a more noble succession of professional ability, mental vigor, and unblemished integrity, in the first lawofficers of the realm. The light of a Marshall will hardly pale

even beside that of a Hardwicke or a Mansfield; but however rigidly we may search, no Macclesfield can be found upon the scroll; from first to last, the ermine has been kept pure and unsullied. Of human frailties, our sages have doubtless had their share, for they were human; but not a breath has ever impeached the integrity of their public lives. With equal hand, and with unsparing diligence, they have continued since the foundation of the empire to measure out justice alike to rich and to poor. The proscribed Tory, contending with the embodied wrath of a powerful state, found there a tribunal which neither the fear of a people, nor its favor, could induce to swerve a tittle from the direct line. The fallen statesman, on whose head were opened all the vials of private jealousy and of public hate, there found an arbiter whose firm mind no elemental convulsion nor popular strife could disturb. Elevated by the dignity of their office, and the respectability of their characters, far above the noisy bustle of the crowd, they shine, as it were, in a firmament all their own; where

"No mist obscures, nor cloud, nor speck, nor stain

Breaks the serene of heaven."

We should be sorry to have it inferred, from anything that has hitherto dropped from us, that there was aught in the character of JOHN JAY of which even the most virtuous of statesmen need have been ashamed. His death-bed was in strict keeping with his whole life, the crowning triumph, as it were, of a long career of dutiful and pious deeds. But it is so much the fashion now-a-days to make every Revolutionary patriot perform actions and imagine sentiments which were, in point of fact, utterly foreign to his hand and head, -to portray the genius of American Independence springing, Minerva-like, into full being from his brain, and radiant in celestial armor,- that in sober truth one is almost disappointed in opening a volume which presents to us, in calm, steady colors, the faithful picture of that gradual and slow operation of causes which, during the decade immediately preceding the Revolution, was training the hearts of men to exchange a loyal devotion to the mother country for indignation and anger, tempered for a while by the hope of a speedy. NO. 169.

VOL. LXXXI.

30

accommodation, and subsequently to abandon this ground for that of undisguised and overt hostility. If biography be really history teaching by example, all will concede that it is useless unless true; else the wanderings of Sinbad the Sailor, or of Captain Lemuel Gulliver, would be as serviceable to the voyager as those of Scoresby or of Ross. To paint man such as he really is not, is the province of romance; the description may be entertaining, but perhaps not instructive. To be enlightened by the genius, to be warned by the example, of those who have gone before, to learn to shun the dangerous rocks and sunken shoals on which they have split, or to be fired to emulate their glorious hardihood in moments of perilous confusion, should be our more serious instigation to the study of their lives. And nowhere will the reader find a more valuable lesson than in that of John Jay.

The history of this eminent statesman has already been well told by his son, and very ill by others whom it is not necessary now to mention. Mr. Flanders, therefore, would seem to have had little else to do than to travel upon a beaten path. Fortunately for himself and the public, however, new lights have of late years been shed upon some of the most important scenes of Jay's career, and that which his son could only hint is now susceptible of proof positive. Otherwise we should hardly venture to dwell very long on a subject that cannot be new to a majority of our readers.

On the 12th of December, 1745, in the village, as it might then almost have been styled, of New York, was born John Jay. For conscience' sake and the love of God's word, his ancestors had alienated themselves from their native shores, whither fortune and friends, their children's cradles and their mothers' graves, in vain lured their return. And their virtue brought its own reward; for it is not in the chain of probability that on any other soil than this such long generations of domestic happiness, brightened, in time, by such illustrious fame, should have been their lot.

The youthful life of Jay was sober, discreet, and pious. If not distinguished in early years by precocious ability, he at least secured the more solid advantages of a healthy and vigorous frame. With an industry restrained only by a rare