ce, the portrait to be engraved and
included in "Delaplaine's Repository of the Lives and Portraits of
Distinguished American Characters," and, from letters of a later date, I
believe that Morse consented to this.

It appears that he must also have received but few, if any, orders for
portraits, for, in the following summer, he started on a painting tour
through New Hampshire, which proved to be of great moment to him in more
ways than one.

Before we follow him on that tour, however, I shall quote from a letter
written by him to his friend Washington Allston:--

Boston, April 10, 1816.

MY DEAR SIR,--I have but one moment to write you by a vessel which sails
to-morrow morning. I wrote Leslie by New Packet some months since and am
hourly expecting an answer.

I congratulate you, my dear sir, on the sale of your picture of the "Dead
Man." I suppose you will have received notice, before this reaches you,
that the Philadelphia Academy of Arts have purchased it for the sum of
thirty-five hundred dollars. Bravo for our country!

I am sincerely rejoiced for you and for the disposition which it shows of
future encouragement. I really think the time is not far distant when we
shall be able to settle in our native land with profit as well as
pleasure. Boston seems struggling in labor to bring forth an institution
for the arts, but it will miscarry; I find it is all forced. They can
talk, and talk, and say what a fine thing it would be, but nothing is
done. I find by experience that what you have often observed to me with
respect to settling in Boston is well founded. I think it will be the
last in the arts, though, without doubt, it is capable of being the
first, if the fit would only take them. Oh! how I miss you, my dear sir.
I long to spend my evenings again with you and Leslie. I shall certainly
visit Italy (should I live and no unforeseen event take place) in the
course of a year or eighteen months. Could there not be some arrangement
made to meet you and Leslie there?

He lived, but the "unforeseen event" occurred to make him alter all his
plans. Further on in this same letter he says:--

"My conscience accuses me, and hardly too, of many instances of
pettishness and ill-humor towards you, which make me almost hate myself
that I could offend a temper like yours. I need not ask you to forgive
it; I know you cannot harbor anger a minute, and perhaps have forgotten
the instances; but I cannot forget them. If you had