fall; and it will be a curious inquiry hereafter to ascertain whether they may be considered authoritative on the still unsettled question concerning the authorship of The Fœderalist.
The publication of Delaplaine's Repository of the Lives and Portraits of Distinguished Americans, in 1816, was the occasion of a discussion of the subject of the authorship of the several numbers of The Fœderalist more public than any which had preceded it. In the biographical sketch of General Hamilton which the first volume of that work contained, the Editor employed the following language:—
"After the publication of the constitution, colonel Hamilton, conjointly with Mr. Madison and Mr. Jay, commenced The Federalist, a work which is justly ranked with the foremost productions in political literature. Besides being the most enlightened, profound, and practicable disquisition on the principles of a federal representative government that has ever appeared, it is a luminous and elegant commentary on the republican establishments of our own country. It was published in the years 1787 and 1788, in a series of essays addressed to the citizens of New York, and had a powerful influence both in that and other states, in procuring the adoption of the federal constitution. The style is as perspicuous, eloquent, and forcible, as the matter is pertinent and the arguments convincing.
"The part which colonel Hamilton bore in this publication, although concealed for a time, has been at length discovered. Indeed had no key to the authorship ever been found, readers of taste and critical discernment would be able to recognize, without such assistance, the traces of his pen. Although his co-adjutors possessed the resources of statesmen and the
