Between the death of Washington and the middle of the nineteenth century grew up a second and numerous generation of great men. Although nearer to us in time, they are not so near to our affections as the elder set. Most of this younger race some of us have seen; and they have thus lost a certain historic grandeur and magnified proportion, always lent by hazy distance to far-off objects. Most of them have been the subjects of newspaper attack, of conversational controversy, of party assault and defence equally damaging, and so have become doubtfully, perhaps disagreeably, familiar. Many of them have been brought into the jurisdiction of our partisan praises and censures for offences against our political principles or passing tastes. Some have been despatched thence with Arizona justice, others by New York equity. Now we have reluctantly dismissed some with Scotch verdicts of “not proven,” with lurking suspicions more injurious than a positive Saxon condemnation of “guilty”; and anon, we have banished others to the penal settlements of our criminal domain. Ingenious biographers, taking up characters hitherto surrendered to the public executioner, asking for reviews of judgments alleged to be hasty, and setting forth, in an attractive way, features which even criminals share with the unindicted and facts unstained, perhaps, with the one great crime which slew their reputations, have recently argued for new trials with a convincing sophistry that few can resist after dinner, and which captivates by its audacious novelty. All of us have discovered what Tacitus long ago so tersely expressed,—our readiness to listen to scandal, and our proneness to praise ourselves for our leniency to the maligned:— “Livor et obtrectatio pronis auribus accipiuntur; quippe adulationi fœdum crimen servitutis, malignitati falsa species libertatis inest.” If the puzzled are generally unsafe, the censorious are usually unfair judges. Members of the same family, too, are among each other as likely to do injustice to a fellow-member by their jealous criticisms, as they are apt before strangers to make themselves and their fellows ridiculous by undiscriminating praise.