In truth, Marshall's was a reverent mind, and it sprang instinctively to the defense of ideas and institutions whose value had been tested. Unfortunately, in his Life of Washington Marshall seems to have given this propensity a somewhat undue scope. There were external difficulties in dealing with such a subject apart from those inherent in a great biography, and Marshall's volumes proved to be a general disappointment. Still hard pressed for funds wherewith to meet his Fairfax investment, he undertook this work shortly after he became Chief Justice, at the urgent solicitation of Judge Bushrod Washington, the literary executor of his famous uncle. Marshall had hoped to make this incursion into the field of letters a very remunerative one, for he and Washington had counted on some thirty thousand subscribers for the work. The publishers however, succeeded in obtaining only about a quarter of that number, owing partly at least to the fact that Jefferson had no sooner learned of the enterprise than his jealous mind conceived the idea that the biography must be intended for partisan purposes. He accordingly gave the alarm to the Republican press and forbade the Federal postmasters to take orders for the book. At the same time he asked his friend Joel Barlow, then residing in Paris, to prepare a counterblast, for which he declared himself to be "rich in materials." The author of the Columbiad, however, declined this hazardous commission, possibly because he was unwilling to stand sponsor for the malicious recitals that afterwards saw light in the pages of the Anas. But apart from this external opposition to the biography, Marshall found a source of even keener disappointment in the literary defects due to the haste with which he had done his work. The first three volumes had appeared in 1804, the fourth in 1805, and the fifth, which is much the best, in 1807. Republican critics dwelt with no light hand upon the deficiencies of these volumes, and Marshall himself sadly owned that the "inelegancies" in the first were astonishingly numerous. But the shortcomings of the work as a satisfactory biography are more notable than its lapses in diction. By a design apparently meant to rival the improvisations of Tristram Shandy, the birth of the hero is postponed for an entire volume, in which the author traces the settlement of the country. At the opening of the second volume "the birth of young Mr. Washington" is gravely announced, to be followed by an account of the Father of his Country so devoid of intimate touches that it might easily have been written by one who had never seen George Washington.