ll for
two hundred dollars, which, he adds, "very seasonably enabled me to
replace a loan by which I had anticipated it. About three hundred and
fifty more (not less) would redeem me completely from the class of
debtors." It is to be hoped it came without further chiding.[4]

The young member was not less attentive to his congressional duties
because of these little difficulties in the personal ways and means.
Military movements seem, without altogether escaping his attention, to
have interested him the least. In his letters to the public men at home,
which were meant in some degree to give such information as in later
times the newspapers supplied, questions relating to army affairs, even
news directly from the army, occupy the least space. They are not
always, for that reason, altogether entertaining reading. One would be
glad, occasionally, to exchange their sonorous and rounded periods for
any expression of quick, impulsive feeling. "I return you," he writes to
Pendleton, "my fervent congratulations on the glorious success of the
combined armies at York and Gloucester. We have had from the
Commander-in-Chief an official report of the fact,"--and so forth and so
forth; and then for a page or more is a discussion of the condition of
British possessions in the East Indies, that "rich source of their
commerce and credit, severed from them, perhaps forever;" of "the
predatory conquest of Eustatia;" and of the "relief of Gibraltar, which
was merely a negative advantage;"--all to show that "it seems scarcely
possible for them much longer to shut their ears against the voice of
peace." There is not a word in all this that is not quite true,
pertinent, reflective, and becoming a statesman; but neither is there a
word of sympathetic warmth and patriotic fervor which at that moment
made the heart of a whole people beat quicker at the news of a great
victory, and in the hope that the cause was gained at last.

All the letters have this preternatural solemnity, as if each was a
study in style after the favorite Addisonian model. One wonders if he
did not, in the privacy of his own room and with the door locked,
venture to throw his hat to the ceiling and give one hurrah under his
breath at the discomfiture of the vain and self-sufficient Cornwallis.
But he seems never to have been a young man. At one and twenty he
gravely warned his friend Bradford not "to suffer those impertinent fops
that abound in every city to divert you fr