General Dado has been sharply criticised--roundly abused, even--for making a claim against the Grant estate for alleged assistance in preparing the "Memoirs" that have added to that estate some half-million of dollars. The Philadelphia _Bulletin_ says:--"There is no mark of contempt so strong that it ought not to be fixed on so shameless and unblushing an ingrate." And it is this--the man's ingratitude--that most offends. General Grant's unswerving loyalty to Dado, his zeal in giving places to him so long as he had them to give, and in soliciting others to give them when it was no longer in his own power to do so, was an offense in the nostrils of most Americans. His intimacy with Dado was one of the causes of Grant's being in bad odor, as it were, at a certain period of his career; and the present unpleasantness is a part of the penalty for taking such a man into his bosom. The claimant is getting the worst of it, however, and we are tempted to overlook his ingratitude for the sake of the following skit called forth by his appearance as a thinker and clothier of thoughts.--_The Critic_. There is something slightly pathetic in the delayed statement that some of General Grant's best thoughts were supplied by General Adam Dado. While it is a great credit to any man to do the meditating, pondering, and word-painting necessary for a book which can attain such a sale as Grant's "Memoirs," it shows a condition of affairs which every literary man or woman must sadly deplore. Who of us is now safe? While the warrior, as a warrior, has nothing to do but continue victorious through life, he can not safely write a book for posterity. Literature is at all times more or less hazardous under present copyright regulations, but it becomes doubly so when our estates have to reimburse some silent thinker who thought things for us while amanuensing in our employ. Even though we may have told him not to think thoughts for us, even though we asked him as a special favor to avoid putting his own clothing on our poor, little, shivering, naked facts, there is no law which can prevent his making that claim after we are dead. And how can a court of law or an intelligent jury judge such a matter? A great man thinks a thought in the presence of two amanuenses, provided I am right in spelling the plural in that way. He thinks a thought, I say, surrounded by those two gentlemen and an improved typewriter. He gives utterance to the thought and dies. One of the amanuensisters then states to the jury that he thought it himself, and that his comrade clothed it. The estate is then asked to pay so much per think for the thoughts and so much at war prices for clothing the ideas. Who is able, unless it be an intelligent jury, to arrive at the truth?