ht up to penetrate an epidermis
heretofore apparently impregnable. Finally, the Albany _Register_ took
up the matter, followed by other Republican papers, until their
purpose to drive the grandson of Jonathan Edwards from the party could
no longer be mistaken.[126]

[Footnote 126: "All the world knew that not Cheetham, but DeWitt
Clinton, thus dragged the Vice President from his chair, and that not
Burr's vices but his influence made his crimes heinous; that behind
DeWitt Clinton stood the Virginia dynasty, dangling Burr's office in
the eyes of the Clinton family, and lavishing honours and money on the
Livingstons. All this was as clear to Burr and his friends as though
it was embodied in an Act of Congress."--Henry Adams, _History of the
United States_, Vol. 1, pp. 331, 332.]

Burr's coterie of devoted friends so understood it, and when the
gentle Peter Irving, whose younger brother was helping the newly
established _Chronicle_ into larger circulation by his Jonathan
Oldstyle essays, showed an indisposition as editor of the Burrite
paper to vituperate and lampoon in return, William P. Van Ness, the
famous and now historic "Aristides," appeared in the political
firmament with the suddenness and brilliancy of a comet that dims the
light of stars.

Van Ness coupled real literary ability with political audacity,
putting Cheetham's fancy flights and inferences to sleep as if they
were babes in the woods. It was quickly seen that Cheetham was no
match for him. He had neither the finish nor the venom. Compared to
the sentences of "Aristides," as polished and attractive as they were
bitter and ill-tempered, Cheetham's periods seemed coarse and tame.
The letters of Junius did not make themselves felt in English
political life more than did this pamphlet in the political circles of
New York. It was novel, it was brilliantly able, and it drove the
knife deeper and surer than its predecessors. What Taine, the great
French writer, said of Junius might with equal truth be said of
"Aristides," that if he made his phrases and selected his epithets, it
was not from the love of style, but in order the better to stamp his
insult. No one knew then, nor until long afterward, who "Aristides"
was--not even Cheetham could pierce the _incognito_; but every one
knew that upon him the full mind of Aaron Burr had unloaded a volume
of information respecting men, their doings and sayings, which
enriched the work and made his rhetoric an instrum