confidence in him was destroyed, and men shrank from contact with him as from a leper. Henry Clay, his former advocate, had now become convinced of his guilt, and refused his proffered hand in the Supreme Court. He earned a bare subsistence by his profession. Even at this time, for his private life no terms of censure can be too strong. It was that of a heartless and profligate libertine.

It is pleasing to turn from so repulsive a picture, and contemplate the noble youth of 1776, flushed with collegiate honors, the hero of Quebec, greeted upon his return with the unanimous "All hail!" of his admiring countrymen, and like a vigorous athlete, with sinewy limbs and elastic tread, entering the arena of life in which he gave the fairest promise to enact a glorious, an immortal part.

At this time he lost his daughter, an only child, who had married Mr. Allston, and removed with him to South Carolina. She is said to have been a remarkable woman, possessing, in addition to the strong practical sense of her father, that bewitching grace and gentleness which is the peculiar gift of her sex. Upon her father's return from Europe, she embarked for New York on the Patriot, which was never heard from after leaving Charleston, and is supposed to have been lost in a storm, or possibly captured by the pirates which at that time infested the South Atlantic main. All the ordinary consolations of age were denied to Burr. He had no family in which he could seek for happiness and a refuge from public disgrace; the men of his own generation had nearly passed away, covered with honors and grateful remembrance; and he was to survive them, clouded in ignominy and shame. At last, in 1836, he died, and for years there was over his ashes not an epitaph, which is accorded to the obscure, not even a tombstone, which is the privilege of the stranger.

When we consider the fundamental and recognized political axiom, that the best government is that which secures the largest amount of happiness to a people, it becomes a point of reasonable conjecture whether the success of Burr's enterprise would not have materially benefited Mexico, though there can be little doubt that his government would have been that of an autocrat, a military despotism. His administra

tive talents were great, and though his rule would have imposed the evils which result of necessity from an exotic yoke, they might have been more than counterbalanced by the abolition of bloodshed and violence, the protection of property, and the restoration of social order.

Burr's letter to Wilkinson clearly indicates an understanding between the writer and the recipient. Otherwise, Burr was far too sagacious to have committed himself by so direct an acknowledgment of his unlawful enterprise to a man holding high office under the government, whose participation or even tacit sanction would have been a betrayal of the na tional trust. Wilkinson's conduct toward Burr does not bear the stamp of a noble mind filled with regret at the errors of a misguided friend, but rather of the anxiety of a frightened and perfidious accomplice to clear his own skirts of the affair, even at the sacrifice of his coadjutor and principal. Had Burr addressed him in such familiar terms in the hope that they would presuppose an implication in the project on the part of Wilkinson, an exposure of which would involve the recipient, thereby compelling his secrecy, what would have been the course of an innocent and high-minded man? Without hesitation he would have given the letter publicity, and disclaimed participation in the plot; he would have challenged investigation, and denounced the man who had attempted to coerce him into unlawful measures by the dread of apparent self-crimination, and who, unable to secure his cooperation by the hope of advancement, would at least compel him to silence by the fear of infamy; and then he would have boldly thrown himself upon his former good name for acquittal and support. Wilkinson was finally guilty of the consummate impudence of sending a messenger to the Spanish Viceroy, demanding the modest amount of two hundred thousand dollars for having saved that country, at great personal sacrifice, from the audacious machinations of Burr, or, as the General characteristically expressed it, "for throwing himself, Leonidas-like, into the Pass of Thermopyla."

Though he was an accessory to schemes which he must known were reprehensible, the mention of Blennertt awakens emotions of another nature than those with

which the memory of his principal is associated. Ruined in fortune, he returned to his native land, where he died. His wife came back to America to seek indemnity for the outrages committed by the populace upon their beautiful home on the memorable 11th of December. Her claims were eloquently supported by Henry Clay, and would have been allowed by Congress; but before the bill was passed, they received intelligence from New York of the death of the brokenhearted petitioner. Seldom has romance afforded so dark a tale of misfortune, as reality has woven around the name of Blennerhassett. The passengers on the steamer gliding down the beautiful Ohio crowd the guards in silence, as they approach the island that still bears his name, and seek to find some trace of the paradise described in the passionate language of Wirt. The stately residence was long since burned to the ground, its site is overgrown by the woodbine and wildbrier, and a few giants of the forest, isolated and alone, are the sole memorials of the sylvan beauty that has departed.

Aaron Burr was certainly an extraordinary man. Bold to conceive, and prompt to execute, he might have become one of the greatest military commanders the world has ever seen. His mental equilibrium was too finely adjusted to be much disturbed either by success or disaster. As a lawyer, he possessed a marvellous instinct for seizing upon the vulnerable points of an argument; as a politician, his judgments of character were sagacious, and his skill in arranging the minor details and machinery of an election was invaluable to his party. Wirt speaks of the light and beauty of his conversation, the seductive and fascinating power of his address. The proper field for the successful display of Burr's remarkable talents was not where a few intrepid minds, in defiance of obloquy and of personal sacrifice, were to make a stand for the great principles of liberty and progress; but when there was a demand merely for ambition, adroitness, and courage, he would have been among the foremost. Under Charles the Second he would have contested with royalty the smiles of those frail beauties whose images have been preserved to us by the pencil of Lely; under Frederick his intrepidity and skill would have placed him in the front rank of those great

captains of the Prussian army, long renowned for being the first tacticians of Europe; under Lorenzo de' Medici, his talents for diplomatic intrigue might have given Machiavelli some reason to fear the influence he would have exercised over his beloved Italy. Burr's heart was hard; his ambition was selfish; his public life was guided by no fixed principle; his private life was that of a debauchee. These are the crimes for which he stands arraigned before the judgment of all good men and patriots. The obloquy his memory has had to endure is not so much because he violated the laws of his country, which are local, but because he systematically outraged and set at defiance the broad principles of common honesty and decency, which are universal. It was for this that he fell ignominiously from his high position, became accursed of his race for ever, and his name a by-word and a shaking of the head to the nation; and that, when he died, philosophy pointed to his life as an example of the evils which may result from the dangerous union of moral depravity and intellectual power, and virtue congratulated itself upon escaping the contaminating presence of a man whom neither public disgrace nor private affliction had contributed in any degree to chasten or to purify. The offences of some other men may have resulted in greater injury to their race; but the errors of Burr were not those of a lofty and heroic mind, and it requires nothing beyond the ken of human prescience to say, that the age is remote when the most lenient of moralists will venture to urge anything in extenuation of the faults that have darkened his fame. anda

There are two men whose deeds have blackened the page of our national record, and the men of the present generation have shown no disposition to mitigate the sentence which

eir forefathers passed upon the characters of Benedict Arold and Aaron Burr. We cannot have the pride of rememering that our greatest benefactors have always been honored with office, yet we can justly reflect that ignominy or forgetfulness has invariably rewarded the Judases that have betrayed us.

ART. III. A Treatise on the Medical Jurisprudence of Insanity. By I. RAY, M. D. Third Edition, with Additions. Boston: Little, Brown, & Co. 1853.

THE study of Insanity in its various phases has occupied much of the attention of the medical practitioner, and taxed the acumen of the metaphysician; and it needs but to glance back to the time when lunacy was regarded as a special manifestation of Divine wrath, and therefore as putting the victim outside the pale of human sympathy, to satisfy us that humanity, if not science, has gained by the labor of the student and the observation of the medical man. Solitary confinement and heavy chains have been supplanted by kind treatment, and by free intercourse with companions within reasonable limits. The superstition, which among some savage tribes made the madman respected as an object half of pity, half of reverence, and among more enlightened nations caused him to be regarded as an outcast from God, has given place to the belief that insanity, in whatever form it appears, is but a disease, a disease which, like most others, may be detected by the professional eye, even when its existence is unsuspected by the many who are in constant intercourse with the sufferer, and the course of which may be checked, and its power perhaps destroyed, by treatment founded on scientific principles.

We have used the term Insanity to denote collectively all abnormal conditions of the mental powers. And the fact meets us on the threshold of our investigation, that the word admits of no more precise definition than this, which includes at once the idiot and the monomaniac. It is indeed impossible to discover any common element in the condition of the sufferers under the several forms of insanity, save that their minds are in an abnormal state.

Mental disease, however, may be considered under two general types, the one embracing those cases whose characteristic is an incomplete or defective development of the faculties; the other, those which are marked by a derangement of the faculties after their development. In the first class we