The Nation Volume 4 (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1867 Excerpt: ...Reed is charged with dealing, had a contemporaneous rumor of the fact, for the diary records the report as one that was brought to their hearingjust at the time when it was alleged long afterwards that the transactions in question had taken place. The printing of the Cadwallader pamphlets and the quarrels out of which they grew did not take place until long after the date of the record in the" Donop Diary." This in itself is curious and significant, without, however, being decisive in any way, and while Mr. Bancroft has properly not com. mented on it, Mr. Reed, with all his protestations of anxiety to meet all the chargQmade against his ancestor, does not mention nor dispose of it. If he has a theory of his own on the subject, it would have been well for him to have added it to the other hypothetical statements with which he has met Mr. Bancroft's direct renewal of the charge. It is perhaps a matter of regret that Mr Reed's varied and thorough knowledge of historical literature had not taken some other direction than that of ancestral biography. His "Life of President Reed" is in many respects an admirable contribution to the biographical history of the Revolution, his "Letters of Esther dc Berdt" a very graceful addition to the little that we possess on the domestic life of leading Revolutionary families. That he should feel deeply the renewal of the attacks on his ancestor is perhaps a sign of repentance and a retraction of the somewhat startling manner in which he claimed the martyrs crown for his own part in our late struggle. The insult which he did to literature both here and in England by his little memoir of Mr. Thackeray is not likely to be soon or easily forgotten by any one whose mis_ fortune it was to se...