o understand nobility in anyone, least of all in
one of his own blood. In the study of lost souls Burr has appealed to
many analysts, and by no one has been made so attractive as by Harriet
Beecher Stowe; who, knowing naught by experience of men of the world,
either idealized them as interesting villains or transformed them into
beasts. In Burr she saw the fallen angel, and bedewed him with many
Christian tears. But I doubt if Burr, the inner and real Burr, had far
to fall. His visible divergence from first conditions was as striking
as, no doubt, it was natural. As the grandson of Jonathan Edwards, the
son of the Reverend Aaron Burr, and reared by relatives of that same
morbid, hideous, unhuman school of early New England theology, it only
needed a wayward nature in addition to brain and spirit to send him
flying on his own tangent as soon as he was old enough to think. After
that his congenital selfishness did the rest. For a time he climbed the
hill of prizes very steadily, taking, once in a way, a flight, swift as
an arrow: in addition to great ability at the bar, and a cunning which
rose to the dignity of a talent, he was handsome, magnetic, well-bred,
and polished, studied women with the precision of a vivisectionist,
assumed emotions and impulses he could not feel with such dexterity that
even men yielded to his fascination until they plumbed him; had in fact
many of the fleeting kindly instincts to which every mortal is subject
who is made of flesh and blood, or comes of a stock that has been bred
to certain ideals. Every wretch has a modicum of good in him, and in
spite of the preponderance of evil in Burr, had he been born under
kindly Southern skies with a gold spoon in his mouth, if, when ambitions
developed, he had had but to stretch out his hand to pluck the prizes of
life, instead of exercising the basest talents of his brain to overreach
more fortunate men, why it is possible that his nature might not have
hardened into a glacier: its visible third dazzling and symmetrical, its
deadly bulk skulking below the surface of the waters which divided the
two parts of him from his victims; might have died in the chaste
reclusion of an ancestral four-poster, beneficiaries at his side. But
that immalleable mind lacked the strong fibre of logic and
foresight--which is all that moral force amounts to--that lifts a man
triumphant above his worst temptations; and he paid the bitter and
hideous penalty in a poverty, lone