one, for he and Washington had
counted on some thirty thousand subscribers for the work. The publishers
however, succeeded in obtaining only about a quarter of that number,
owing partly at least to the fact that Jefferson had no sooner learned
of the enterprise than his jealous mind conceived the idea that the
biography must be intended for partisan purposes. He accordingly gave
the alarm to the Republican press and forbade the Federal postmasters
to take orders for the book. At the same time he asked his friend Joel
Barlow, then residing in Paris, to prepare a counterblast, for which
he declared himself to be "rich in materials." The author of the
"Columbiad," however, declined this hazardous commission, possibly
because he was unwilling to stand sponsor for the malicious recitals
that afterwards saw light in the pages of the "Anas."

But apart from this external opposition to the biography, Marshall found
a source of even keener disappointment in the literary defects due to
the haste with which he had done his work. The first three volumes had
appeared in 1804, the fourth in 1805, and the fifth, which is much the
best, in 1807. Republican critics dwelt with no light hand upon the
deficiencies of these volumes, and Marshall himself sadly owned that
the "inelegancies" in the first were astonishingly numerous. But the
shortcomings of the work as a satisfactory biography are more notable
than its lapses in diction. By a design apparently meant to rival the
improvisations of "Tristram Shandy", the birth of the hero is postponed
for an entire volume, in which the author traces the settlement of the
country. At the opening of the second volume "the birth of young Mr.
Washington" is gravely announced, to be followed by an account of the
Father of his Country so devoid of intimate touches that it might easily
have been written by one who had never seen George Washington.

Nevertheless, these pages of Marshall's do not lack acute historical
judgments. He points out, for instance, that, if the Revolution had
ended before the Articles of Confederation were adopted, permanent
disunion might have ensued and that, faulty as it was, the Confederation
"preserved the idea, of Union until the good sense of the Nation adopted
a more efficient system." Again, in his account of the events leading
up to the Convention of 1787, Marshall rightly emphasizes facts which
subsequent writers have generally passed by with hardly any mention, so
th