oad. You're right; but then
Forget not there's an outer to your inner,--
A whole that binds your parts,--a truth for man
As well as chemist,--and your lecture-room,
With magic vials and quaint essences
And odors strange, may teach your students less
Than this June morning, with the sun and flowers.

THOMAS JEFFERSON.[1]

The biography before us is so voluminous that it can hardly maintain
the popularity to which its subject entitles it. He must be a bold
man, and to some degree forgetful of the brevity of life, who, for
any ordinary purpose of information or amusement, undertakes to read
these huge octavos. True, the theme is somewhat extended;
Jefferson's life was a protracted and busy one; he took a leading
part in complicated transactions, and promulgated doctrines which
cannot be summarily discussed. But the author's prolixity has not
grown out of the extent of his theme alone. He is both diffuse and
digressive. He introduces much irrelevant matter, and tells
everything in a round-about-way. By a judicious exercise of the arts
of elimination and compression, we think that all which illustrates
the subject might have been comprised in one volume much smaller
than the smallest of these.

But Mr. Randall's most serious fault arises from his desire to be
thought a fine writer. Without making long extracts, it is
impossible to give any conception of the absurdities into which this
childish ambition has led him. The tropes and metaphors, the tawdry
tinsel, the common tricks of feeble rhetoricians are reproduced here
as if they were the highest results of rhetorical art. The display is
often amusing. Thus, in describing Mrs. John Adams, Mr. Randall says:
"Her lofty lineaments carried a trace of the Puritan severity. They
were those of the helmed Minerva, and not of the cestus-girdled Venus."
We do not mention this in order to justify a strain of captious
criticism, but to ask Mr. Randall, in all seriousness, how it was
possible for him to associate a staid and sensible New England
matron with Venus and Minerva? What would he say of a writer who
should gravely tell us that Washington's features were those of the
cloud-compelling Jupiter, not of Mars, slayer of men,--and that
Franklin's countenance resembled that of the wily Ulysses, not that
of the far-ruling Agamemnon? We might fill this paper with passages
like the one we have quoted. What is the use of this kind of writing?
It does not convey any