No apology need be offered for featuring the personalities of the time. They throw light on motives and explain events. The episode of Mrs. Eaton changed the current of political history. The gossip concerning Mrs. White indicates the putridity of political factionalism. The scurrilous biography of Van Buren written by Davie Crockett on the suggestion of Senator White is illuminative of the popular prejudices of the times; and the solemn investigation of the charge that Senator Poindexter had instigated the attempt upon the life of the President at the Capitol discloses the morbidity of the partisan madness. Through the gossip of the drawing-rooms, the jottings of the diaries, the editorial comments of the contemporary press, the social and political intrigues of women, the attempt is made to re-create something of the atmosphere by which the remarkable statesmen and politicians of the Jackson Administrations were affected. Generations have been taught to respect or reverence the memories of the extraordinary men of the Thirties who rode on the whirlwind to direct the storms; and, their human weaknesses forgotten, their sinister, selfish purposes ignored, their moral or intellectual limitations overlooked, they seem, in the perspective of the years, stern, austere, always sincere, and singularly free from the vices of politicians, as we have come to know them in the leaders of a later day. And yet it would be difficult to find creatures more thoroughly human than these who are usually presented to us as steel engravings, hung high on the wall in a dim light. They move across the page of history scarcely touching or suffering the contamination of the ground. They seem to play their parts upon a stage impressive and imposing, suspended between earth and heaven. That they lived in houses, danced, gambled and drank, flattered and flirted, gossiped and lied, in a Washington of unpaved streets and sticky black mud, made their way to night conferences through dark, treacherous thoroughfares, and played their brilliant parts in a bedraggled, village-like capital, is not apt to occur to one. Thus, in tracing the political drama of this portentous period, an attempt is made to facilitate the realization that they were flesh and blood, and mere men to their contemporaries, not always heroic or even admirable, through the visualization of the daily life they lived in a capital peculiarly crude and filled with grotesque incongruities.