ment
of Comic Biography, we believe, has received few contributions, if any,
from the frolic quills of wicked wags. The cure, however, of this defect
in our literature, if any there be, may be looked upon as begun in the
work whose title stands at the head of this notice. The author, indeed,
had not the settled purpose of the facetious writers we have just
dispraised, of making game of the subject of his book, no more than he
has the wit and cleverness which half redeem their naughtinesses.
The absence of these latter qualities is supplied in his case by
the self-complacent good faith in which he puts forth his monstrous
assumptions and the stolid assurance with which he maintains them. But
the effect of his labors, as of theirs, is to throw an atmosphere of
ludicrous ideas around the memory of a great man, painful to all persons
of good taste and correct feelings.

Filial piety is a virtue to which much should be forgiven. And the son
of such a father as Alexander Hamilton might well be pardoned for even
an undue estimate of his services, if it were kept within the decent
bounds of moderate exaggeration. But when he undertakes to make his
father the incarnation of the Revolution and of the Republic, and to
concentrate all the glories of that heroic age in him as the nucleus
from which they radiate, he must pardon us, if we think, that, by long
contemplation of the object of his filial admiration, his mental sight
has become morbid and distorted, and sees things which are not to be
seen. Beginning his book with the assumption that Hamilton was the
first to conceive the idea, of "the Union of the People of the United
States,"--an assumption which we can by no means admit, though supported
(as we learn from a foot note) by the opinion of Mr. George Ticknor
Curtis,--the author proceeds "to trace in his life and writings the
history of the origin and, early policy of this GREAT REPUBLIC." Through
the whole volume, "THE REPUBLIC" stands rubric over the left hand page,
and "HAMILTON" over the right, and the identity of the two is sought to
be established from the beginning to the end. Now, deep as is the sense
we entertain of the services of Hamilton to his country, and scarcely
less than filial as is the veneration we have been taught from our
earliest days to feel for his memory, we must pronounce this pretension
to be as absurd and futile in itself as it is unjust and ungenerous to
the other great men of that pregnant peri