of the imagination which he selected for expressing his views on
humanity;--to paint crime; to castigate tyranny; to vindicate
honesty; to portray the abomination of corruption, the turpitude
of debauchery and the baseness of servility;--to represent
fortitude in its strength and grandeur, innocence in its grace and
beauty, while standing forth the sturdy admirer of heroism and
freedom; the tender friend of virtue in misfortune; the austere
enemy of successful criminality, and the inflexible dispenser of
good and evil repute.

That a man of such great parts and extensive learning, with such
fine thoughts, beautiful sentiments and wise reflections;--such a
cool, abstracted philosopher, yet such an over-refined
politician;--such a gloomy moralist, yet such an acute, fastidious
observer of men and manners, was a cloistered monk or any obscure
individual whatever was an idea to be immediately dispelled from
the mind, for that the Annals was composed by such a man would
have been about as incomprehensible an occurrence, as it would be
impossible to conceive that an acrobat who exercises gymnastic
tricks upon the backs of galloping horses in an American circus
could discharge the functions of a First Lord of the Treasury or a
Justice in the High Court of Judicature, or that a pantaloon in a
Christmas pantomime could think out the Principia of Sir Isaac
Newton or the Novum Organum of Lord Bacon. The fact was, the
author was a conspicuous, shining light of his generation; the
associate of princes and ministers; who, from the commanding
position of his exalted eminence, cast his eyes over wide views of
mankind that stretched into sweeping vistas of artifice and
dissimulation; and who, for close upon half a century,
participated prominently in the active business,--the subdolous