escience so common to him, he
realized the inevitableness of the end, as history does to-day. His only
chance had been to placate Adams and recreate his enemy's popularity.

The day never came when he was able to say that he might have done this
at the only time when such action would have counted. He had been
inexorable until the pamphlet was flung to the public; and then,
although he was hardly conscious of it at the moment, he was immediately
dispossessed of the intensity of his bitterness toward Adams. The
revenge had been so terrible, so abrupt, that his hatred seemed
disseminating in the stolen leaves fluttering through the city.
Therefore his mind was free for the appalling thought which took
possession of it as Troup poured out his diatribe; and this thought was,
that he was no longer conscious of any greatness in him. Through all the
conflicts, trials, and formidable obstacles of previous years he had
been sustained by his consciousness of superlative gifts combined with
loftiness of purpose. Had not his greatness been dinned into his ears,
he would have been as familiar with it. But he seemed to himself to have
shrivelled, his very soul might have been in ashes--incremated in the
flames of his passions. He had triumphed over every one of his enemies
in turn. Historically he was justified, and had he accomplished the same
end impersonally, they would have been the only sufferers, and in the
just degree. But he had boiled them in the vitriol of his nature; he
had scarred them and warped them and destroyed their self-respect. Had
these raging passions been fed with other vitalities? Had they ravaged
his soul to nourish his demons? Was that his punishment,--an instance of
the inexorable law of give and take?

He recalled the white heat of patriotism with which he had written the
revolutionary papers of his boyhood, the numberless pamphlets which had
finally roused the States to meet in convention and give the wretched
country a Constitutional Government, "_The Federalist_"; which had
spurred him to the great creative acts that must immortalize him in
history. He contrasted that patriotic fire with the spirit in which he
had written the Adams pamphlet. The fire had gone out, and the
precipitation was gall and worm-wood. Even the spirit in which he had
first attacked Jefferson in print was righteous indignation by
comparison.

Had he hated his soul to cinders? Had the bitterness and the
implacability he had encou