ernment which he had imbibed." Virginia would be, of course, against
Burr, because, Morris writes,

Virginia can not bear to see any other than a Virginian in the
President's chair!

John Adams was President and Thomas Jefferson vice-President, in 1800.
It is edifying for us who look on the "demigods" of 1787 with profound
reverence, to see them at close range in Gouverneur Morris's pages.

Washington fares well at his hands, Lafayette not nearly so well:

one could not expect the blast of a trumpet from a whistle.

But, then, Morris had had money transactions with the Lafayettes. Morris
believed that no man ever existed who controlled himself so well as
Washington. Shall we put the "Diary" just after the "Autobiography of
Benjamin Franklin," not far from Beveridge's "Marshall" and at least on
the same shelf with the perennial Boswell?

I read the confessions of Cardinal de Retz and of Gouverneur Morris many
times with a dip now and then, by way of a change, into the
Autobiography of Anthony Trollope. This is rather a change from the
kickshaws of France to the roast beef of old England. This
autobiography never seems to me to be merely a book made to encourage
authors to be industrious and hard-working. It is more than that. It is
the expression of the life of an unusual man, who did an unusual thing,
and who writes about himself so well and so sincerely that he gives us
an insight into a phase of English character which none of his novels
ever elaborated.

What Trollope did may be done again, but hardly in the American
atmosphere, with the restless American nerves and that lack of
doggedness which characterizes us. The picture Trollope gives of himself
as a member of the English gentry, deprived of all the advantages of his
caste except an inborn class feeling, is worth while, and the absence of
self-pity is at once brave and pathetic. He knew very well what he
wanted, and he secured it by the most honest and direct means. He knew
he could get nothing without work, and he worked. His exercise of
literature as an avocation did not prevent him from being a good public
servant.

As a typical Englishman brought up in the country, he liked to hunt.
Hunting is a prerogative of the leisurely and the rich. He obtained
leisure at a great sacrifice, and he became fairly rich through the
same sacrifice. He tells us of all this with a manliness and lack of
sentimentalism which endears this book to me. It is