If it is surprising that these astute and devoted friends did not appreciate, in some measure, at least, the extent to which popular esteem had been withdrawn from their favourite, it is most astonishing that Burr himself did not recognise the strength of the Clinton-Livingston-Spencer machine as it existed in 1804. Its managers were skilled masters of the political art, confident of success, fearless of criticism, unscrupulous in methods, and indefatigable in attention to details. They controlled the Council of Appointment, its appointees controlled the Assembly, and the Assembly elected the Council, an endless chain of links, equally strong and equally selfish. To make opposition the more fruitless, the distrust of Burr, hammered into the masses by Cheetham's pen, practically amounted to a forfeiture of party confidence. One cannot conceive a more inopportune time for Burr to have challenged a test of strength, yet Lansing's selection had hardly sounded in the people's ears before Burr's "Little Band," burning with indignation and resentment at his treatment, gathered about the tables in the old Tontine Coffee House at Albany and launched him as an independent candidate. Rarely has a candidate for governor encountered greater odds; but with Burr, as afterward with DeWitt Clinton, it was now or never. In one of his dramas Schiller mourns over the man who stakes reputation, health, everything upon success--and no success in the end. Even Robert Yates, the coalition candidate in 1789, started with the support of a Federalist machine and the powerful backing of Hamilton. But in 1804 Burr found himself without a party, without a machine, and bitterly opposed by Hamilton. When the sceptre passed from Federalist to Republican in 1801, Hamilton gave himself to his profession with renewed zeal, earning fifteen thousand dollars a year, and a reputation as a lawyer scarcely surpassed by Daniel Webster. "In creative power Hamilton was infinitely Webster's superior," says Chief Justice Ambrose Spencer, before whom both had practised.[132] Erastus Root, possibly looking through the eyes of Theodosia, thought Burr not inferior to Hamilton as a lawyer, although other contemporaries who knew Burr at his best, regarded him as an indefatigable, tireless, adroit lawyer rather than a profound and learned one. This put him in a different class from Hamilton. As well might one compare Offenbach with Mozart as Burr with Hamilton. [Footnote 132: H.C. Lodge, _Life of Alexander Hamilton_, pp. 276-7.]