Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow

to King George III of England. Each issue carried reverential excerpts from parliamentary debates in London, showcasing William Pitt the Elder and other distinguished orators, and retailed gossipy, fawning snippets about the royal household.
    Having a potential place to publish, Hamilton began to scribble poetry. Once his verbal fountain began to flow, it became a geyser that never ceased. The refined wit and pithy maxims of Alexander Pope mesmerized the young clerk, and just as Pope wrote youthful imitations of the classical poets so Hamilton penned imitations of Pope. On April 6, 1771, he published a pair of poems in the Gazette that he introduced with a diffident note to the editor: “Sir, I am a youth about seventeen, and consequently such an attempt as this must be presumptuous; but if, upon perusal, you think the following piece worthy of a place in your paper, by inserting it you’ll much oblige Your obedient servant, A. H.” The two amorous poems that follow are schizophrenic in their contrasting visions of love. In the first, the dreamy poet steals upon his virgin love, who is reclining by a brook as “lambkins” gambol around her. He kneels and awakens her with an ecstatic kiss before sweeping her up in his arms and carrying her off to marital bliss, intoning, “Believe me love is doubly sweet / In wedlock’s holy bands.” 9 In the next poem, Hamilton has suddenly metamorphosed into a jaded rake, who begins with a shocking, Swiftian opening line: “Celia’s an artful little slut.” This launches a portrait of a manipulative, feline woman that concludes:
    So, stroking puss’s velvet paws,
How well the jade conceals her claws And purrs; but if at last
You hap to squeeze her somewhat hard She spits—her back up— prenez garde; Good faith she has you fast.
    The first poem seems to have been composed by a sheltered adolescent with an idealized view of women and the second by a world-weary young philanderer who has already tasted many amorous sweets and shed any illusions about female virtue. In fact, this apparent attraction to two opposite types of women—the pure and angelic versus the earthy and flirtatious—ran straight through Hamilton’s life, a contradiction he never resolved and that was to lead to scandalous consequences.
    The next year, Hamilton published two more poems in the paper, now recreating himself as a somber religious poet. The change in heart can almost certainly be attributed to the advent in St. Croix of a Presbyterian minister named Hugh Knox. Born in northern Ireland of Scottish ancestry, the handsome young Knox migrated to America and became a schoolteacher in Delaware. As a raffish young man, he exhibited a lukewarm piety until a strange incident transformed his life. One Saturday at a local tavern where he was a regular, Knox amused his tipsy companions with a mocking imitation of a sermon delivered by his patron, the Reverend John Rodgers. Afterward, Knox sat down, shaken by his own impiety but also moved by the sermon that still reverberated in his mind. He decided to study divinity at the College of New Jersey (later Princeton) under its president, Aaron Burr, an eminent divine and father of the man who became Hamilton’s nemesis. It was almost certainly from Knox’s lips that Alexander Hamilton first heard the name of Aaron Burr.
    Ordained by Burr in 1755, Knox decided to propagate the gospel and was sent to Saba in the Dutch West Indies. This tiny island near Nevis measured five square miles, had no beaches, and was solitary enough to try the fortitude of the most determined missionary. Rough seas girded Saba’s rocky shores, making it hazardous for ships to land there. As the sole clergyman, Knox resided in a settlement known as the Bottom, sunk in the elevated crater of an extinct volcano; it could be reached only by climbing up a stony path. Knox left a bleak picture of the heedless sinners he was assigned to save. “Young fellows and married men, not only without