m. They certainly claim no advantages over those of
their sister States, and are sensible of more favorable circumstances
existing with many of them, and happily availed, which our situation
does not offer. But the paper respecting Monticello, to which you
allude, was not written by a Virginian, but a visitant from another
State; and written by memory at least a dozen years after the visit.
This has occasioned some lapses of recollection, and a confusion of some
things in the mind of our friend, and particularly as to the volume of
slanders supposed to have been cut out of newspapers and preserved. It
would not, indeed, have been a single volume, but an Encyclopaedia in
bulk. But I never had such a volume; indeed, I rarely thought those
libels worth reading, much less preserving and remembering. At the end
of every year, I generally sorted all my pamphlets, and had them bound
according to their subjects. One of these volumes consisted of personal
altercations between individuals, and calumnies on each other. This
was lettered on the back, 'Personalities,' and is now in the library of
Congress. I was in the habit, also, while living apart from my family,
of cutting out of the newspapers such morsels of poetry, or tales, as
I thought would please, and of sending them to my grandchildren, who
pasted them on leaves of blank paper and formed them into a book. These
two volumes have been confounded into one in the recollection of our
friend. Her poetical imagination, too, has heightened the scenes she
visited, as well as the merits of the inhabitants, to whom her society
was a delightful gratification.

I have just finished reading O'Meara's Bonaparte. It places him in a
higher scale of understanding than I had allotted him. I had thought him
the greatest of all military captains, but an indifferent statesman, and
misled by unworthy passions. The flashes, however, which escaped
from him in these conversations with O'Meara, prove a mind of great
expansion, although not of distinct developement and reasoning. He
seizes results with rapidity and penetration, but never explains
logically the process of reasoning by which he arrives at them. This
book, too, makes us forget his atrocities for a moment, in commiseration
of his sufferings. I will not say that the authorities of the world,
charged with the care of their country and people, had not a right
to confine him for life, as a lion or tiger, on the principles of
self-preservat