Colonel Burr accorded the palm of eloquence to General Hamilton, whom
he frequently characterized as a man of strong and fertile
imagination, of rhetorical and even poetical genius, and a powerful
declaimer. Burr's ruling passion was an ardent love for military
glory. Next to the career of arms, diplomacy, no doubt, would have
been his choice, for which not only his courtly and fascinating
manners, but every characteristic of his mind peculiarly adapted him.
It is idle now to speculate upon what he might have been had
Washington yielded to the importunities of Madison, Monroe, and
others, and appointed him minister to the French republic. Our
country, before which he then stood in the original brightness of his
character, would have been honoured in the choice, both at home and
abroad, and his own destiny, at least, would have been widely
different.

Notwithstanding oratory was not his forte, and he never spoke in
public with satisfaction to himself, still many anecdotes are told of
him which would show that the effect of his speeches were sometimes of
unequalled power. It is said, that at the close of his farewell
address to the Senate of the United States on his retirement from the
vice-presidency, there was scarcely a dry eye to be seen among his
grave auditors, many of whom were his bitter political adversaries.
His manner of speaking was any thing but declamatory, and more
resembled an elevated tone of conversation, by which a man, without
any seeming intention, pours his ideas in measured and beautiful
language into the minds of some small select circle, dislodging all
which they may have previously entertained upon a particular subject,
and fixing his own there, by the power of a seeming magical
fascination, which he could render, when he chose, almost
irresistible. To judge him by his success as a public speaker, few men