Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB

critics who thought those volumes too apathetic and coldly impartial. For, though both works have been written in the same spirit, and, with allowances for the variations above pointed out, on the same plan, a few figures, large as life, and kept for a length of time before the eye, though the general style of art be in no respect different, will naturally produce a different effect from numerous groups, mostly in miniature, succeeding each other with panoramic rapidity.

The present volume embraces the administration of Washington, a period of the greatest importance, as having fixed upon the federal gov ernment that character and those methods of administration which it has ever since retained; important, also, for the origin and array of the party divisions which form a chief subject of the entire work.

The second volume will include the administration of John Adams; the downfall of the Federalists; the transfer of power to the Republican party by the election of Jefferson; and his administration, starting with the proposal to reduce exercises of federal authority to a minimum, and ending with those very extraordinary measures of the embargo and non-intercourse.

The third volume, in relating the administration of Madison, will exhibit the theories of the two political parties brought to the test of a severe experience, by which both the one and the other, but especially the dominant party, were driven to occupy, in a great measure, the very position of

their political opponents-a change of ground which, in combination with other causes, produced a complete extinction, during Monroe's first term, of the old party divisions so far as they were grounded upon any thing more than mere personal and local antipathies; which, indeed, had exercised from the beginning an influence by no means inconsiderable.

These three volumes, while they serve as a continuation of the three already published, will, like those, constitute also a separate work, complete in itself.

« AnteriorContinuar »