Page:American Historical Review vol. 6.djvu/852

842 The paper is elaborately illustrated, many of the plates being colored reproductions of hand paintings. While the paper is a model of scientific description nevertheless the style is entertaining and trenchant.

Thomas Jefferson, by Thomas E. Watson. [Beacon Biographies.] (Boston: Small, Maynard and Co., 1900, pp. xv, 150.) In reading this attractive sketch it is of interest and of importance to keep in mind its author's position of leadership in a party which claims Jefferson as its founder.

A brief chronological table and a descriptive bibliography will prove serviceable to the many whom Mr. Watson's graceful introduction will incite to a closer acquaintance with his hero. However brief, the bibliography should not have failed to mention Ford's edition of Jefferson's Writings.

The man's portrait is sketched with telling strokes. It is remarkable that so few pages can give so comprehensive an understanding of the immense versatility of the man, of the range of his interests and information, and of his great and manifold services to state and nation. But Mr. Watson is master of a style at once terse and vivid; it is to be regretted that it is also not infrequently both undignified and intemperate.

Jefferson's failings are treated with a remarkable lightness of touch; indeed his innocence is at times emphasized at the expense of his insight. Scant acknowledgment is made of any constructive work upon which Jefferson was privileged to build. The most extended reference to Washington is an anecdote the sole point of which is to make "his own personal brand of austere dignity" seem ridiculous in comparison with Jefferson's loose unconventionality. Of the many allusions to Hamilton there is but one that is not acrid and atrabilious. He is ever the "political trader," the "adventurer," the "upstart," who with "his corrupt squadron of henchmen" is "striving to put the United States under the heels of Great Britain." In every feature of Hamilton's financial policy Mr. Watson can see nothing but a British enormity which Hamilton servilely imported with the deliberate intention that here "as in England," it might "fix a perpetual debt, an everlasting burden on the back of 'the mob' who were thus held in bondage from age to age, laboring patiently for those who owned the debt."

In short, Mr. Watson's avowed purpose, "to steer clear of the controversial,"—a thing almost impossible in narrating the life of one of the greatest of party leaders,—finds its accomplishment only in the heaping of epithets and innuendoes upon Jefferson's opponents. He has "tried to write just as the truth seems to be;" but it may be questioned whether the smoke of the political battle has not distorted the vision.

Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, seventh series, Vol. I. (Boston, the Society, pp. xxxviii, 389). Upon the first