Criticisms of Marshall's "Life of Washington" were not, however, confined to Jefferson and the Republicans. Plumer thought the plan of the work "preposterous."[738] The Reverend Samuel Cooper Thatcher of Boston reviewed the biography through three numbers of the _Monthly Anthology_.[739] "Every reader is surprized to find," writes Mr. Thatcher, "the history of North America, instead of the life of an individual.... He [Washington] is always presented ... in the pomp of the military or civil costume, and never in the ease and undress of private life." However, he considers Marshall's fifth volume excellent. "We have not heard of a single denial of his fidelity.... In this respect ... his work [is] _unique_ in the annals of political history."
Thatcher concludes that Marshall's just and balanced treatment of his subject is not due to a care for his own reputation: "We are all so full of agitation and effervescence on political topicks, that a man, who keeps his temper, can hardly gain a hearing." Indeed, he complains of Marshall's fairness: he writes as a spectator, instead of as "one, who has himself descended into the arena ... and is yet red with the wounds which he gave, and smarting with those which his enemies inflicted in return"; but the reviewer charges that these volumes are full of "barbarisms" and "grammatical impurities," "newspaper slang," and "unmeaning verbiage."
The Reverend Timothy Flint thought that Marshall's work displayed more intellect and labor than "eloquence and interest."[740] George Bancroft, reviewing Sparks's "Washington," declared that "all that is contained in Marshall is meagre and incomplete in comparison."[741] Even the British critics were not so harsh as the _New York Evening Post_, which pronounced the judgment that if the biography "bears any traces of its author's uncommon powers of mind, it is in the depths of dulness which he explored."[742]
The British critics were, of course, unsparing. The _Edinburgh Review_ called Marshall's work "unpardonably deficient in all that constitutes the soul and charm of biography.... We look in vain, through these stiff and countless pages, for any sketch or anecdote that might fix a distinguishing feature of private character in the memory.... What seemed to pass with him for dignity, will, by his reader, be pronounced dullness and frigidity."[743] _Blackwood's Magazine_ asserted that Marshall's "Life of Washington" was "a great, heavy book.... One gets tired and sick of the very name of Washington before he gets half through these ... prodigious ... octavos."[744]