“… paupertas impulit audar
Ut versus facerem.”
—poverty has often been the sting which urged genius to its grandest efforts. But Hazlitt, though undoubtedly a man of genius, was not gifted with that genius of the first order, which abstracts itself wholly from the miserable circumstances about it. The great body of his work is criticism, brilliant, entertaining, even instructive at the moment in which it was produced, but substantially only the fashion of a day.
Of the poet Campbell and Lady Blessington it would be an impertinence to say anything on the slight foundation this volume gives us.
The editor of the “Bric-à-Brac” Series has placed on the cover of each volume this motto:
“Infinite riches in a little room.”
We will suggest one that will take up even less room:
“Stultitiam patiuntur opes.”
The Civil Government of the States, and the Constitutional History of the United States. By P. Cudmore, Esq., Counsellor-at-Law, Author of the Irish Republic, etc., etc. New York: P. Cudmore. 1875.
The author of this work informs us in the preface that his object has been to condense into one volume the colonial, general, and constitutional history of the United States. This volume professes to be a digest of the writings and speeches of the fathers of the Constitution of the United States, the statutes of the several States, the statutes of the United States, of the writings and speeches of eminent American and foreign jurists, the journals and annals of Congress, the Congressional Globe, the general history of the United States, the decisions of the Supreme Courts of the several States, the opinions of the attorneys-general of the United States, and the decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States; of extracts from De Tocqueville, the Madison Papers, the Federalist, Elliott’s Debates, the writings of Jefferson, Adams, Hamilton, and Vattel, and of extracts from Jefferson and other eminent authors on parliamentary law. The platforms of political parties are also given. This list is copied verbatim from the author. It will be seen, therefore, that Mr. Cudmore has set himself no contemptible task to accomplish, and, as he has executed it in a thin octavo of 254 pages, it may reasonably be conjectured that he possesses a talent for condensation that Montesquieu might have envied. Mr. Vallandigham finds a powerful advocate in this author, and his philippics against Mr. Stanton are proportionately severe. Mr. Cudmore has a fondness for notes of exclamation; and such is the ardor of constitutionalism with which he pursues this latter-day “tyrant of the blackest dye” (we quote Mr. Cudmore) that it often takes three notes of admiration to express his just abhorrence of his measures. The bulk of the work is taken up by a civil and military history of the late conflict, and the disputes that preceded it. If we might venture a hint to Mr. Cudmore, we would say that his tone is a little too warm for this miserably phlegmatic age, which affects a fondness for impartiality in great constitutional writers. The fact is, the questions which the author discusses with the greatest spirit are dead issues. They still preserve a faint vitality for the philosopher and speculative statesman, but they have sunk out of sight for the practical politician and man of to-day. The vis major has decided them. We might as usefully begin to agitate for a re-enactment of the Agrarian Laws. Mr. Cudmore’s Chapters IV. and V., containing a digest of State and Federal law, show much meritorious industry. The history of land-grants, the homestead law, and the laws pertaining to aliens and naturalization, will be found useful.