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THE BOSTON REVIEW.

FOR

MAY, 1808.

Librum tuum legi quam diligentissime potui annotavi, quæ commutanda, quæ eximenda, arbitrarer. Nam ego dicere verum assuevi. Neque ulli patientius reprehenduntur, quam qui maxime laudari merentur.

PLIN.

ART. 13.

The Life of George Washington, commander in chief of the American forces, during the war which established the independence of his country, and first president of the United States. Compiled under the inspection of the honourable Bushrod Washington, from original papers bequeathed to him by his deceased relative, and now in possession of the author. To which is prefixed an introduction, containing a compendious view of the colonies planted by the English on the continent of North America, from their settlement to the commencement of that war, which terminated in their independence. By John Marshall. Vol. 1. Philadelphia, printed and published by C.P. Wayne. 1804.

WE owe an apology to our readers for the long delay of our notice of a work, which, whether we consider the grandeur of its subject, or the great and merited reputation of its author, presents itself with higher claims to attention, than any one, which it has hitherto been our fortune to examine. The cause of the delay we will frankly confess.

Distrusting our own competency to a task, requiring so much preliminary knowledge, and so much curious research; and desirous that a work of so much importance should be examined by judges better capable of appreciating its merits and defects, we have successively applied to several gentlemen, who have all the requi sites, which knowledge, talents and taste can give. Our hopes of success have been confident, till within the last six months; but either because the undertaking has been found by our friends less inviting than it appeared at a distance; or, because engaged in more important avocations, or possibly because the Anthology has appeared too humble a vehicle for their labours; from or all these causes, hopes have been entirely disappointed. We are at last compelled to trust to our own resources, and

some

our

we presume we shall not be suspected of too much humility when we express our fears, that we bring to the task little other claim to attention than that of impartiality and fidelity. We may however venture to say, that our survey of the work has cost us labour. We have consulted all the accessible authorities

of Judge Marshall, and examined most of them with minuteness and care. Where we have doubted we have sought and obtained confidence from a gentleman, who leaves us only to regret, that he has not himself attempted, what he has shown us he is so able to perform. If therefore there should be any one, who thinks, that after this confession of our previous want of familiarity with the subject, our opinions are advanced with too much confidence, we may remind him, that our assertions are fortified by better authorities than our own, and that Teucer may be daring, when sheltered behind the buckler of Ajax.

On opening the volumes of Judge Marshall every reader is surprized to find the history of North America, instead of the life of an individual, and this as it is the most obvious, we imagine to be the most popular objection to the work. Yet it is to be recollected, that the precise boundary between history and biography is not always easily adjusted. In writing the lives of publick characters the limit between them is entire ly artificial. Their biography is in truth history, or at least the line of separation between them, is so indistinct, so unmarked by any natural division, that the biographer has nothing to remind him that he is passing the limit of his own prov. ince, and invading the territories of the historian. The biographer of Washington will feel this truth more than of any other character in the whole compass of history. To Washington we are indebted for every thing for which a nation can be grateful to an individual, and from his accession to office till his death, his name is in some way connected with every publick event of importance in our history. Even those events in which he did not

personally share are necessary to be known in order to appreciate the circumstances, which contributed to his success, and to know also the full extent of the difficulties with which he was compelled to struggle. We do not hesitate to say therefore, that in our opinion, Judge M. is completely justified in interweaving with his biography a history of the American revolution, and of the events which succeeded it. The early history of our country, with which the work commences, is however a voluntary offering, and to defend it is rather less easy. We concede to Judge Marshall the necessity of giving such a survey of preceding events as to make the reader acquainted with the genius, character and resources of the people about to engage in the revolutionary contest. But we confess that we think this object would have been better attained by a disquisition on the nature and causes of the revolution an undertaking for which the habits of thought and investigation of Judge Marshall peculiarly fits him. This plan we think would have included a survey of all the principal events of our early history; and while it would have given greater scope for the display of his philosophical genius, than mere narration admits, he would not have been tied down to that minute and rigid exactness with which in a historian we cannot dispense. Our most serious objection to the mode he has adopted is the very great addition which it makes to his already laborious task, and we cannot forbear to wish that the time which he has bestowed on it, had been devoted to the perfection and elaboration of his necessary duties. We are the more disposed to quarrel with this part of his plan because we think that it has contributed to produce what in our

;

view is the greatest general objection to his performance, that it is too uniformly historical; that we see too few tracts of the private character of Washington; that he is always presented to us in the pomp of the military or civil costume, and never in the ease and undress of private life. We complain not that there is too much history, but that there is too little biography. With the same documents, the same life might be written a century hence when none shall survive, who have seen the man, and remember any of those single and unimportant peculiarities, which constitute the charm of biography, and form the most strongly marked distinction between it and history. We scarcely know a little fact in these volumes, which a professed historian would not feel obliged to incorporate into his work, though not perhaps quite so much in detail. This cannot have arisen from any insuperable difficulties in his subject, because we have often seen the same difficulties successfully combated. We think, for example, Judge Marshall might have found a nearly faultless model for his undertaking, in Tacitus' Life of Agricola. Though Agricola was a mere soldier by profession, and though his life was distinguished by no other important circumstances, than the conduct of a campaign, yet has his biographer contrived to keep our interest perpetually centered in his hero; and at the conclusion of the work has given us a portrait of him, which, for perfection of outline and delicacy of touch, challenges comparison with any thing ancient or modern. It would be easy to find other proofs of the practicability of uniting biography and history. But it is time to attempt to estimate what we already possess, without indulging in useless wishes of imagin

ary and perhaps impossible improve

ment.

The work before us obviously takes three grand divisions; the first, embracing the early history of our country; the second, the American war; and the last, the establishment of the constitution and the political administration of the first President.

We know not whether to number it among the advantages or infelicities of the historian of our country, that so few important events are even doubtful. We have none

of that indulgence to give to the fables of antiquity, which Livy thinks should be conceded to them, because they render the origin of nations consecrated and august. In the early history of North America, nothing is fictitious and scarcely any thing exaggerated. Yet is it not a subject either mean or uninteresting. The spectacle of a new country peopled by civilized men in a refined age; bringing with them the opinions, habits, and arts of civilization; freed from those fetters of feudality and superstition, against which the reason of mankind has so long and in every other country except Great Britain, unsuccessfully contended; occupying too a country of every variety of climate and circumstance, which can contribute to develope and modify the human character; it must be confessed that this is a spectacle, as grand and imposing as can be well conceived. Whether we are sufficiently distant from the æra of these events, to judge of them with impartiality is rather doubtful; but that a connected narration of them can be made interesting and attractive, we think Judge Marshall has successfully shown. The principal merit, however, of a piece of history must consist in the general arrangement of the materials, in the selection of those which are

important and worthy to be enlarged on, from those which are trifling and only to be mentioned; in the philosophy of the views, which are taken of their mutual connexions and consequences; and fmally in the general fidelity and accuracy of the writer. Let us then successively apply these criteria to the first volume of Judge Marshall.

not surpassed in political interest by any part of the history of either of the other colonies. We should glad. ly have seen from Judge Marshall's pen a more copious account of the convention at Albany, in 1754, which Gov. Pownal* considers not only as the original cause of our revolution, but of that revolutionary spirit which has new modelled the continent of Europe. We have already hinted our regret that Judge Marshall has not more indulged his genius in philosophical speculations on the causes, relations and consequences of events, nor is his mode of grouping and disposing facts, so that a philosophical reader may himself draw the inferences, perfect enough to completely supply the defect. Wherever he has given us any political reflections, however, they are of a kind to make us regret that they are not more numerous.

As the work is professedly an abstract, the necessity of arrangement and selection is uncommonly strong; and it has been properly felt and regarded by Judge Marshall. Till after the first century of our history, the circumstances of the other colonies besides Virginia and Massachusetts are comparatively unimportant; and the author has therefore with much judgment given his greatest attention to these parent provinces. His arrangement is every where sufficiently lucid, and never disordered by a too exact adherence to chronological order. To select from so great a mass of facts, those only which are important was more difficult, and though on the whole he has been generally successful, we cannot say that he has not sometimes narrated events with a minuteness disproportionate to their magnitude, and in one or two instances passed over silently or slightly some which are entitled to greater respect Among the first we are disposed to place parts of the history of the colonization of Virginia, a subject on which he naturally dwells with complacency, and the introduction of the account of the defeat of Braddock in the twelfth chapter, and the partial repetition of it in the first of the second volume, is at least somewhat awkward. The most remarkable instance of the last is the meagerness of the account of the settlement of Pennsylvania by Penn; the detail of which, in our opinion, is reigns of Europe and the Atlantick.

We come now to the consideration, which after all must decide the permanent value of a history, the fidelity and accuracy of the writer. To be wanting in these respects, is in a historian, a fault so original and radical, that it depraves his whole system, and one which no merit of any other kind, however splendid, can in any degree redeem. The sentence, which impartial criticism pronounces on the faithless historian can never be reverted; and no grace and flow of narration, no harmony or beauty of stile, not even ingenuity of thought, or novelty of observation, can mitigate the punishment which he deserves, who has presumed to claim for fiction and exaggeration, those honours which are due only to fidel. ity and truth. We place the histo ries of Voltaire on the same shelf with the Arabian Tales, with the

Memorial addressed to the Sove

reflection that he has taken the liberty of a writer of romance without the apology of fable. The judgment, however, which we make on him, whose only object in writing history is to display his powers of fine writing, and who, for the sake of amusing, habitually disregards all the restraints of accuracy, must be a good deal modified before it will apply to him, who writes with honourable intentions, and only errs where his authorities mislead him. Every errour indeed makes a large deduction from the confidence with which we read him, but if he cites his authorities we know when we are secure and when it is necessary to be on our guard. These observ. ations do not in general apply to Judge Marshall. We would not be understood to insinuate, that we have observed any mark of indifference to the laws of historical exactness, far less any trace of willing neglect of them. But we are compelled to say, that the haste in which the first volume has been composed, is too visible, and we have observed so many instances of inaccuracy, that we have even been sometimes tempt ed to imagine, that the subject of American History had not engaged much of his critical attention, before he became a historian. His authorities, if he has cited all he possesed, are by no means complete, and that on which he has most implicitly relied on, is by no means correct. In support of the first assertion it would be ea

sy to display a list of many important documents; but, besides that we are not authorized to assume the facts. Such an enumeration would be rather out of place. We must, however, mention one work, the Collections of the Historical Socie

ty, which is so completely indispensable to a historian of our country, that we cannot sufficiently regret,

that Judge Marshall so evidently appears ignorant of its existence. The authority on which we have hinted that our author seems to have too unsuspiciously confided in the posthumous and unfinished volume of Robertson; a name splendid enough to mislead any one, who has not submitted to the drudgery of comparing him with the original historians, and discovered that he deserves every other praise, but that of accuracy. We will mention an instance in which Judge Marshall has been deceived by reliance on Robertson's accuracy; particularly as the errour is of kindto awaken all our feellings of New-England nationality. mistake has been so well exposed by Dr. Holmes in his Annals (in our judgment the most accurate book of so much importance, which has been published in America,) that we shall, without ceremony transscribe his observations.

The

"An obscure sect," says Judge M. on the authority of Robertson," which had acquired the appellation of Brownists from then ame of its founder and which hadrendemocracy of its tenets respecting church dered itself peculiarly obnoxious by the government, had been driven by persecution to take refuge at Leyden,in Holland, where its members formed a distinct society under the care of their pastor, Mr. John Robinson. There they resided several years in safe obscurity. This situation at length became irksome to them. Without persecution to give importance to the particular points which separated them from their other christian brethren,

they made no converts; and their chilmarriages in Dutch families, and by endren were drawn from them by intergaging in the Dutch service. They saw before them, with extreme apprehension, the prospect of losing their separate identity, and of becoming entirely Dutch. In the extinction of their church, they dreaded also the loss of those high attainments in spiritual knowledge, which they deemed so favourable to truth. The laxity of exterior manners too, which

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