But the life of a strong man, lived no matter where, and perhaps all the more if it have been isolated from the noisier events which make so large a part of history, contains the best material of biography. Judge Parsons was fortunate in a son capable of doing that well, which, even if ill done, would have been interesting. A practised writer, the author of two volumes of eloquent and thoughtful essays, Professor Parsons has known how to select and arrange his matter with a due feeling of effect and perspective. When he fails to do this, it is because here and there the essayist has got the better of the biographer. We are not concerned here, for example, to know Mr. Parsons's opinions about Slavery, and we are sure that the sharp insight and decisive judgment of his father would never have allowed him to be frightened by the now somewhat weather-beaten scarecrow of danger to the Union.
In the earlier part of the Memoir we get some glimpses of pre-Revolutionary life in New England, which we hope yet to see illustrated more fully in its household aspects.[A] The father of Parsons was precisely one of those country-clergymen who were "passing rich on forty pounds a year." On a salary of two hundred and eighty dollars, he brought up a family of seven children, three of whom he sent to college, and kept a hospitable house.
[Footnote A: Mr. Elliott, in his New England History, has wisely gathered many of those unconsidered trifles which are so important in forming a just notion of the character of a population. We cannot but wish that our town-historians, instead of giving so much space to idle and often untrustworthy genealogies, and to descriptions of the "elegant mansions" of Messrs. This and That, would do us the real service of rescuing from inevitable oblivion the fleeting phases of household scenery that help us to that biography of a people so much more interesting than their annals. We would much rather know whether a man wore homespun, a hundred years ago, than whether he was a descendant of Rameses I.]
Of Parsons's college experiences we get less than we could desire; but as he advances in life, we find his mind exercised by the great political and social problem whose solution was to be the experiment of Democracy at housekeeping for herself,—we see him influencing State and even National politics, but always as a man who preferred attaining the end to being known as the means,—and finally, as Chief Justice, reforming the loose habits of the bar, intolerant of gabble, and leaving the permanent impress of his energetic mind and impatient logic on the Common Law of the country.
We know nothing more striking than the dying speech recorded in the concluding chapter. At the end of a life so laborious and so useful, the Judge, himself withdrawing to be judged, murmurs,—"Gentlemen of the Jury, the facts of the case are in your hands. You will retire and consider of your verdict." In this volume, the son has submitted the facts of the case to a jury of posterity. His case will not be injured by the modesty with which he has stated it. He has claimed less for his father than one less near to him might have done. We think the verdict must be, that this was a great man marooned by Destiny on an out-of-the-way corner of the world, where, however he might exert great powers, there was no adequate field for that display of them which is the necessary condition of fame.
Mr. Parsons has done a real service to our history and our letters in this volume. Accompanying and illustrating his main topic, he has given us excellent sketches of some other persons less eminent than his father, sometimes from tradition and sometimes from his own impressions. We hope in the next edition he will give us a supplementary chapter of personal anecdotes, of which there is a large number that deserve to be perpetuated in print, and which otherwise will die with the memories in which they are now preserved. The strictly professional part of the biography, illustrating the Chief Justice's more important decisions, might also be advantageously enlarged.
RECENT AMERICAN PUBLICATIONS.
Songs of the Church; or Psalms and Hymns of the Protestant Episcopal
Church, arranged consecutively to Appropriate Melodies; together with
a Full Set of Chants for each Season of the Christian Year. New York.
Delisser & Proctor. 12mo. pp. 453. $1.00.
Napoleonic Ideas. Des Idées Napoléoniennes, par Le Prince Napoléon Louis
Bonaparte. Brussels, 1839. Translated by James A. Dorr. New York. D.
Appleton & Co. 12mo. pp. 154. 50 cts.
The Art of Extempore Speaking. Hints for the Pulpit, the Senate, and the
Bar. By M. Bautain, Vicar-General and Professor at the Sorbonne, etc.,
etc. With Additions by a Member of the New York Bar. New York. Charles
Scribner. 12mo. pp. 304. $1.00.