the debates
of Congress, of State legislatures, of stump-orators, in addresses,
answers, and newspaper essays; and to these, without question, may be
added the private correspondences of individuals; and the less guarded
in these, because not meant for the public eye, not restrained by the
respect due to that, but poured forth from the overflowings of the heart
into the bosom of a friend, as a momentary easement of our feelings.
In this way and in answers to addresses, you and I could indulge
ourselves. We have probably done it, sometimes with warmth, often with
prejudice, but always, as we believed, adhering to truth. I have not
examined my letters of that day. I have no stomach to revive the memory
of its feelings. But one of these letters, it seems, has got before the
public, by accident and infidelity, by the death of one friend to whom
it was written, and of his friend to whom it had been communicated,
and by the malice and treachery of a third person, of whom I had never
before heard, merely to make mischief, and in the same Satanic spirit,
in which the same enemy had intercepted and published, in 1776, your
letter animadverting on Dickinson's character. How it happened that I
quoted you in my letter to Doctor Priestley, and for whom, and not for
yourself, the strictures were meant, has been explained to you in my
letter of the 15th, which had been committed to the post eight days
before I received yours of the 10th, 11th, and 14th. That gave you the
reference which these asked to the particular answer alluded to in the
one to Priestley. The renewal of these old discussions, my friend, would
be equally useless and irksome. To the volumes then written on these
subjects, human ingenuity can add nothing new, and the rather, as lapse
of time has obliterated many of the facts. And shall you and I, my Dear
Sir, at our age, like Priam of old, gird on the

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Shall we, at our age, become the athletes of party, and exhibit
ourselves, as gladiators, in the arena of the newspapers? Nothing in the
universe could induce me to it. My mind has been long fixed to bow to
the judgment of the world, who will judge by my acts, and will never
take counsel from me as to what that judgment shall be. If your objects
and opinions have been misunderstood, if the measures and principles of
others have been wrongfully imputed to you, as I believe they have been,
that you should leave an explanation of them, would be a