cale more comprehensive, and in a country more
healthy and central than our old William and Mary, which these obstacles
have long kept in a state of languor and inefficiency. But the tardiness
with which such works proceed, may render it doubtful whether I shall
live to see it go into action.

Putting aside these things, however, for the present, I write this
letter as due to a friendship coeval with our government, and now
attempted to be poisoned, when too late in life to be replaced by new
affections. I had for some time observed, in the public papers, dark
hints and mysterious innuendoes of a correspondence of yours with a
friend, to whom you had opened your bosom without reserve, and which was
to be made public by that friend or his representative. And now it is
said to be actually published. It has not yet reached us, but extracts
have been given, and such as seemed most likely to draw a curtain of
separation between you and myself. Were there no other motive than that
of indignation against the author of this outrage on private confidence,
whose shaft seems to have been aimed at yourself more particularly, this
would make it the duty of every honorable mind to disappoint that
aim, by opposing to its impression a seven-fold shield of apathy
and insensibility. With me, however, no such armor is needed. The
circumstances of the times in which we have happened to live, and the
partiality of our friends at a particular period, placed us in a state
of apparent opposition, which some might suppose to be personal also:
and there might, not be wanting those who wished to make it so, by
filling our ears with malignant falsehoods, by dressing up hideous
phantoms of their own creation, presenting them to you under my name,
to me under yours, and endeavoring to instil into our minds things
concerning each other the most destitute of truth. And if there had
been, at any time, a moment when we were off our guard, and in a temper
to let the whispers of these people make us forget what we had known of
each other for so many years, and years of so much trial, yet all men,
who have attended to the workings of the human mind, who have seen
the false colors under which passion sometimes dresses the actions and
motives of others, have seen also those passions subsiding with time and
reflection, dissipating like mists before the rising sun, and restoring
to us the sight of all things in their true shape and colors. It would
be strange,