partisan hate and all the wise forbearance of patriotic self-possession were arrayed face to face in so fierce an opposition that Washington justly described the period as 'a momentous crisis.' It was denounced as cowardly; it was defended as expedient; copies were publicly destroyed amid shouts of exultation: Jay was burned in effigy; the Boston Chamber of Commerce voted in favor of its ratification: Hamilton, under the signature of 'Camillus,' analyzed its claims, and deprecated the bitter hostility it had evoked; and Fisher Ames, in pleading for moderation to both parties, in the House of Representatives, embalmed his patriotic counsel with such heroic patience and eloquent references to his approaching end, that his speech became one of the standard exemplars of American eloquence. 'When the fiery vapors of the war lowered in the skirts of our horizon,' he observes, 'all our wishes were concentred in this one--that we might escape the desolation of the storm: this treaty, like a rainbow on the edge of the storm, marked to our eyes the space where it was raging, and afforded, at the same time, the sure prognostic of fair weather: if we reject it, the vivid colors will grow pale; it will be a baleful meteor, portending tempest and war.' And he ends this remarkable speech in these words: 'I have thus been led by my feelings to speak more at length than I had intended. Yet I have perhaps as little personal interest in the event as any one here. There is, I believe, no member who will not think his chance to be a witness of the consequences greater than mine. If, however, the vote should pass to reject, and a spirit should rise, as it will, with the public disorders, to make confusion worse confounded, even I, slender and almost broken as my hold upon life is, may outlive the Government and Constitution of my country.' Jay's own remarks on the subject in his private correspondence, are characteristic alike of his rectitude of purpose and equanimity of soul: 'The approbation,' he observes, in a letter to Dr. Thatcher, 'of one judicious and virtuous man relative to the conduct of the negotiations, affords me more satisfaction than clamor and intrigue have given me concern.'