now retiring from every species of
public occupation, to pass the remainder of life as a private citizen;
and he promises me a visit in the course of the summer. As you hold out
a hope of the same gratification, if chance or purpose could time your
visits together, it would make a real jubilee. But come as you will, or
as you can, it will always be joy enough to me. Only you must give me a
month's notice; because I go three or four times a year to a possession
ninety miles southwestward, and am absent a month at a time, and the
mortification would be indelible of losing such a visit by a mistimed
absence. You will find me in habitual good health, great contentedness,
enfeebled in body, impaired in memory, but without decay in my
friendships.

Great, indeed, have been the revolutions in the world, since you and I
have had any thing to do with it. To me they have been like the howlings
of the winter storm over the battlements, while warm in my bed. The
unprincipled tyrant of the land is fallen, his power reduced to its
original nothingness, his person only not yet in the mad-house, where
it ought always to have been. His equally unprincipled competitor, the
tyrant of the ocean, in the mad-house indeed, in person, but his
power still stalking over the deep. '_Quem deus vult perdere, prius
dementat_.' The madness is acknowledged; the perdition of course
impending. Are we to be the instruments? A friendly, a just, and a
reasonable conduct on their part, might make us the main pillar of their
prosperity and existence. But their deep-rooted hatred to us seems to
be the means which Providence permits to lead them to their final
catastrophe. '_Nullam enim in terris gentem esse, nullum infestiorem
populum, nomini Romano_, said the General who erased Capua from the list
of powers. What nourishment and support would not England receive from
an hundred millions of industrious descendants, whom some of her people
now born will live to see here. What their energies are, she has lately
tried. And what has she not to fear from an hundred millions of such
men, if she continues her maniac course of hatred and hostility to them.
I hope in God she will change. There is not a nation on the globe
with whom I have more earnestly wished a friendly intercourse on equal
conditions. On no other would I hold out the hand of friendship to
any. I know that their creatures represent me as personally an enemy to
England. But fools only can believe this