powerful influence on his whole course, that he was at the same time, as his friend Morris described him, "more a theoretic than a practical man." It was natural that a mind so easily excited and an imagination so vivid as Hamilton's seem always to have been, should have formed exaggerated ideas as well of the extent and character of the embarrassments under which the country was laboring, as of the causes from which they sprang. These were undoubtedly very serious, very difficult to be dealt with; and it is equally true that they had been greatly aggravated by, if they were not, as he was very willing to consider them, mainly attributable to the defects of the former federal system. But there was some misapprehension, and no small degree of exaggeration upon these points. We are indeed an imaginative people, and the transfer of our fathers to a new country and climate doubtless accounts for the great difference in this respect between ours and the cool, deliberate, and unimpressible temperaments and character retained by those in Europe who have the same descent. It was not to have been expected that a country so young as our own, and as unprepared, could have passed through a seven years' war with a powerful nation without involving itself in grave embarrassments; but when the extent of those embarrassments, the difficulties of dealing with them, and the then resources of the country are now regarded, it seems impossible to avoid the conclusion that the grounds for the alarm then so prevalent upon the subjects of the public credit and the public revenues were greatly overrated. [18] At the same interview Talleyrand told me an anecdote which, considering the depressed condition of Colonel Burr at the period to which it referred, I thought descriptive of a harsh act on the part of my informer, and I do not repeat it without hesitation. "Burr," he said, "called in pursuance of a previous communication from him, and, his card being brought up, he directed the messenger to say that he could not receive a visit from Colonel Burr, and referred him, for an explanation of his refusal, to a painting hanging over the mantel-piece in the antechamber, which was a portrait of Hamilton." The visit was probably one of courtesy, with a possible hope of being able to enlist Talleyrand in his (Burr's) Mexican schemes.