_New York Magazine_,
Carey's _Museum_, and the _Universal Asylum_, though at this time he
"lamented that the editors of the different gazettes in the Union do not
more generally and more correctly (instead of stuffing their papers with
scurrility and nonsensical declamation, which few would read if they were
apprised of the contents,) publish the debates in Congress on all great
national questions."

Presently, for personal and party reasons, certain of the papers began to
attack him, and Jefferson wrote to Madison that the President was
"extremely affected by the attacks made and kept up on him in the public
papers. I think he feels these things more than any person I ever met
with." Later the Secretary of State noted that at an interview Washington
"adverted to a piece in Freneau's paper of yesterday, he said that he
despised all their attacks on him personally, but that there never had
been an act of government ... that paper had not abused ... He was
evidently sore and warm." At a cabinet meeting, too, according to the same
writer, "the Presidt was much inflamed, got into one of those passions
when he cannot command himself, ran on much on the personal abuse which
had been bestowed on him, defied any man on earth to produce a single act
of his since he had been in the govmt which was not done on the purest
motives, that he had never repented but once the having slipped the moment
of resigning his office, & that was every moment since, that _by god_ he
had rather be in his grave than in his present situation. That he had
rather be on his farm than to be made _emperor of the world_ and yet that
they were charging him with wanting to be a king. That that _rascal
Freneau_ sent him 3 of his papers every day, as if he thought he would
become the distributor of his papers, that he could see in this nothing
but an impudent design to insult him. He ended in this high tone. There
was a pause."

To correspondents, too, Washington showed how keenly he felt the attacks
upon him, writing that "the publications in Freneau's and Bache's papers
are outrages on common decency; and they progress in that style in
proportion as their pieces are treated with contempt, and are passed by in
silence, by those at whom they are aimed," and asked "in what will this
abuse terminate? The result, as it respects myself, I care not; for I have
consolation within, that no earthly efforts can deprive me of, and that
is, that neither ambitious nor i