was not of that nobler kind allied with and made possible through frugality. He freely gave away that with which he ought to have paid his debts, or made provision against the day of his necessities. Whatever other bad qualities Burr had, and they were many, it is said of him that no man would go further to alleviate the sufferings of another, or make greater sacrifices to promote the interests of a friend. He was, moreover, passionately fond of children, and mingled often in their innocent sports. However hard his lot, he never repined. However much he had been the victim of injury and injustice, he never denounced any one. He came before us first in public life as a soldier. As such we found him brave, indefatigable, sacrificing; as an officer, efficient, sagacious, prompt, ranking at the early age of twenty-two among the first. It is true that he seemed to be actuated rather by a love of, and ambition for military glory, than an exalted sentiment of patriotism; yet we are not to forget that in that service he sacrificed his health and patrimony. Though but a boy in appearance, it is said that his presence among his troops was a sufficient pledge of good order, and if at the head of his regiment, almost an equal pledge of victory. He was a rigid disciplinarian, a consummate tactician, and indefatigable in the pursuance of this plan. To what heights of distinction he might have attained, had not his health failed him, we can only conjecture. Mr. Parton says: "Had his Mexican expedition succeeded, I think he had it in him to run as successful a career in Spanish America, as did Napoleon in Europe." As a lawyer Colonel Burr cannot, according to the acute analysis of his biographer, claim a place among the greatest of his profession. Yet as a lawyer of the second rank, as a skillful practitioner, rather than one particularly erudite or profound, he thinks his equal never lived. As a speaker he was colloquial in his style, dignified and impressive in manner, resembling, says Mr. Davis, "an elevated tone of conversation, by which a man, without any seeming effort, pours his ideas in measured and beautiful language into the minds of some small select circle, dislodging all they may have previously entertained upon a given subject, and fixing his own there by a magical fascination, which when he chose he could make almost irresistible." His speeches were usually argumentative, short, and pithy. His appeals, whether to judge or jury, were sententious and lucid. No flights of fancy, no parade of impassioned sentences, were to be found in them. Never vehement or declamatory, he was always conciliating and persuasive. Whatever he had to say he spoke boldly, and plainly, and deliberately. Too dignified ever to be a trifler, his sarcasm rarely created a laugh, but told powerfully upon those who provoked it. It is not a little strange, in view of the signal success which always attended his oratorical efforts, that he should feel, as he has been frequently heard to express himself, that he was no orator, having never spoken with pleasure or even selfsatisfaction. Indeed he seems never to have been proud of anything save his military career. What he achieved in law or politics was as nothing in his eyes in comparison with his deeds as a soldier of the Revolution. But at any rate, judging from results, but few men could be called more eloquent. Unfortunately no complete or authentic specimen of his eloquence has ever come down to us. As a statesman, less philosophical and profound than Hamilton, far less comprehensive and general in his views than Jefferson, he was yet sagacious, discriminating, and practical, possessing withal an adminstrative ability rarely equaled. He belonged, in a word, to that class of men whom we denominate shrewd, sagacious politicians, rather than profound statesmen. Originating no ideas himself, no man knew better how to invent the necessary tactics to carry out the ideas of another. Jefferson said of him that, "he was a great man in little things, but really a small one in great ones." One of the truest remarks Hamilton ever made of his antagonist was, “that his talents were better adapted to a particular plot than a great and wise drama.” Colonel Burr's mind, then, cannot be said to have been a comprehensive one, but rather acute, analytical, and discriminating, quick to conceive things in detail, but not calculated to entertain masses of ideas. Distinguished as was Mr. Burr as a polemic, "great and brilliant" as Mr. Parton thinks he would have become as an instructor of youth, we agree with Mr. Davis in thinking that his peculiar intellectual gifts, together with his courtly and fascinating manners, pre-eminently fitted him for diplomacy. While it is altogether idle and vain to speculate upon what he might have become had Washington yielded to the importunities of Madison, Monroe, and others, and appointed him minister to the French Republic, it is yet not only possible, but quite probable, that, standing as he then did in the original brightness of his character, he would have reflected honor upon the country, shed new luster on his own name, and prepared the way for a destiny widely different from what his was. The morals of Colonel Burr, as is well known, were most corrupt. Believing in the Bible, he yet practically discarded it as useless. Disgusted with the ascetic features of Puritanism, reared under a type of religion that did not engage his affections nor satisfy his intellect, he seems to have turned his back upon the faith of his fathers altogether; with the rash hand of impatience to have thrown away the sweet with the bitter, all the wheat with the chaff, and to have degenerated into an unnatural example of Voltairian skepticism and Chesterfieldian vanity and falseheartedness. From the beginning to the end of his career we find no trace of moral principle. He never, apparently, felt any compunction of conscience for whatever he may have done; yet, in justice to him, let it be said, he was no foul-mouthed scoffer at religion. His integrity as a politician has been a subject of much discussion. As destitute as he was of any moral principle, as exclusive, exacting, and subtle as was his selfishness, we yet have no evidence that he ever abandoned his convictions for a price. Though his path was indeed a tortuous one, yet it was not therefore necessarily one of perfidious intrigue. Though his ambition was without limit or restraint, we have no evidence that it was a treasonable ambition. Unscrupulous as he was in the use of means, it would yet be difficult to point out a single instance in his public life where he was ever disloyal. With regard to the matter of Burr's relations with women there is some difference of opinion between Mr. Davis and Mr. Parton. The former says: "The sacred bonds of friendship were unhesitatingly violated when they operated as barriers to the indulgence of his passions." And such has ever been the prevailing opinion. But Mr. Parton assures us, on the other hand, on what to him appears good authority, that Mr. Burr has been somewhat belied in this matter; that he was far from being the tricky Satanic monster of prevailing tradition; that he was no debauchee; that he gave no evidence of a love for any of the grosser forms of licentiousness; that indeed for him to have been a sensualist of a brutal order, would have been a constitutional impossibility. He assures us that he was "no corrupter of virgin innocence, no despoiler of honest households, no betrayer of tender confidences, but only a man of gallantry," who, except invited, never was guilty of carrying an intrigue to the point of criminality, etc. But this description, after all, only converts him into the smooth, smiling, plausible demon, a character indeed reminding us forcibly of Goethe's Mephistophiles in Faust. Colonel Burr was about five feet six inches in height. He was well-formed and erect in his attitudes. In all his movements there was a military air. Although of small stature there was a loftiness of mien about him that could not pass unnoticed by a stranger. His deportment was polished and courtly. His features were regular, and generally considered handsome. His eye was jet black, with a brilliancy never surpassed, while his whole manner, whether performing the appropriate civilities of the drawing-room, or furnishing entertainment in a more privately social way, was inconceivably fascinating. Strange that a man whom nature formed to move in so exalted a sphere of usefulness, should ever consent to be influenced, much less actuated, by considerations other than such as ought to govern an honorable mind; nay, condescend to wallow in the quagmire of insatiate and unhallowed passion, to draggle the pinions of a spirit which might and ought to have been an angel of light to the world, in the cess-pools of infamy and lust. Yet this only teaches that important lesson, so often taught, that intellectual strength is no defense against the cruel power of temptation, no guarantee of dominion over ourselves. Had this most remarkable man, created manifestly by the God of nature to put forth a commanding agency in human affairs, only fashioned his character after the type and pattern furnished in the Gospel; had he but consented to have been guided by those high moral considerations by which a Milton, a Burke, or a Washington were guided, and upon which alone can be predicated success; had he, in a word, but consented to have been a faithful servant of the Most High, his life, instead of being a signal and unhappy failure, as now, might have been a victorious success. His name, instead of being universally held up to execration and "cast out as evil," might have been gratefully remembered for all coming time; where he now may have been a curse, he might have been the instrument of vast benedictions to millions. But his career now looms up dark in the history of the past, as a signal token of God's eternal displeasure with such as, though responsible for a mighty influence in the world, dare to trifle with it by living "without God." The results of his conduct verify the words of Young : "Talents, angel bright, and in his own experience as faithfully verify the fearful predictions of the Psalmist concerning those that forget God: "His house and his heart shall be left unto him desolate; his life shall be smitten down to the ground, and he made to dwell in darkness as one long dead." We behold in him, if not all that Gilfillan saw in his ancient prototype in Paradise Lost, "the clouded ruins of a God," at least the wreck of all that is divine in man. "He lived," indeed, as Washington Irving said of King Philip," a wanderer and a fugitive in his native land, and went down at last like a lonely bark, foundering amid darkness and tempest, without a pitying eye to weep his fall, or a friendly hand to record his struggle." ART. V.-HUDSON ON A FUTURE LIFE. Debt and Grace, as related to the Doctrine of a Future Life. By C. F. HUDSON. 12mo., pp. 472. Boston: J. P. Jewett & Co. 1857. THE present age of theology is eminently characterized by a re-examination of fundamental positions which were supposed to have been long since settled; and among these the knottiest subjects have been sturdily grappled with. The striking peculiarity of many of these efforts is that they have originated in Christian minds, thus differing from the hostile attacks which infidels of the last century, and doubters of the modern school, have made upon the cardinal doctrines of the Bible. It is noticeable that Calvinism, especially, has not only lost the firm grasp upon its advocates which once led them unflinchingly to maintain its direst tenets, but it has undermined many of the basis truths of Christianity in those earnest, inquiring minds that have once begun to question its dogmas. Most of the erratic theories that have lately been broached among us on the hard questions of free will, free grace, and free destiny, have evidently been the reactions of yearning souls long bound down under the iron dicta of this system; yet it is noteworthy, that most, or all, of these, when they have rejected the dogmas of this stern theology, (for it is too repugnant to assimilate with humanity,) have nevertheless failed to attain the equipoise of a just Arminianism; they have either groped helplessly in the dark, confessing themselves bewildered with a conflict which they are unable to terminate, or they have rushed to some extreme of downright heterodoxy. We suspect another of these struggles in the conclusions arrived at in a new work, the title of which we give above; a book which, by its extent of research, cogent and fearless reasoning, no less than by the magnitude and interest of the topics handled, is probably destined to exert a marked influence in theological circles. It proposes to solve the great enigma of the continuance of sin in an endless future, by the extinction of the sinner from being; but it sets forth the proposition of annihilation from a Christian point of view, and discusses the questions involved in a manner and spirit so different from other |