the seventh of March following, reiterated the charges against Mr. Madison; and Mr. Russell, editor of The Boston Centinel, who had ventured to consider that the statement of Mr. Madison and those of General Hamilton "must stand on the same elevation until one or the other is removed by contradictory or confirmatory facts," suffered "the penalty" which had been prepared for, but not imposed upon Mr. Gideon, the publisher of the new edition of The Fœderalist.
The dispute does not appear to have been revived; and in the errors—which are evident, and acknowledged by his most zealous friends—into which General Hamilton had fallen in the preparation of the memorandum which he left in Judge Benson's office, as well as of that which was written in his own copy of The Fœderalist; in the recollections of Mr. Jay, imperfect as they are acknowledged to have been, even concerning those numbers of which he was the author; in the structure of many of the disputed numbers themselves; and in the general assent of the literary and legal communities to the classification of the authors as made by Mr. Madison in his own copy of The Fœderalist, and copied by Mr. Gideon, the reader may find evidences of the good judgment which Mr. Coleman displayed in withdrawing from a controversy, in the conduct of which his own violent temper, his uncontrollable partisan bitterness, and his ignorance of the exact truth concerning the subject in dispute, or his willingness to conceal it when it conflicted with his purposes, rendered him the most valuable auxiliary of his opponents, and the most dangerous ally of his friends.
While The Fœderalist was yet incomplete, the great ability which had been displayed by its authors had so far attracted the attention of the reading public throughout other States than that for which it had been especially written, that a collective edition of the essays
