The sharpest assault it had to endure, however, was in a communication, dated August 27, and printed in the "Sangamo Journal" of September 2, not only dissecting the administration circular with the most savage satire, but covering the Auditor with merciless personal ridicule. It was written in the dialect of the country, dated from the "Lost Townships," and signed "Rebecca," and purported to come from a farmer widow of the county, who expressed in this fashion her discontent with the evil course of affairs. Shields was a man of inordinate vanity and a corresponding irascibility. He was for that reason an irresistible mark for satire. Through a long life of somewhat conspicuous public service, he never lost a certain tone of absurdity which can only be accounted for by the qualities we have mentioned. Even his honorable wounds in battle, while they were productive of great public applause and political success, gained him scarcely less ridicule than praise. He never could refrain from talking of them himself, having none of Coriolanus's repugnance in that respect, and for that reason was a constant target for newspaper wits. After Shields returned from the Mexican war, with his laurels still green, and at the close of the canvass which had made him Senator, he wrote an incredible letter to Judge Breese, his principal competitor, in which he committed the gratuitous folly of informing him that "he had sworn in his heart [if Breese had been elected] that he should never have profited by his success; and depend upon it," he added, in the amazing impudence of triumph, "I would have kept that vow, regardless of consequences. That, however, is now past, and the vow is canceled by your defeat." He then went on, with threats equally indecent, to make certain demands which were altogether inadmissible, and which Judge Breese only noticed by sending this preposterous letter to the press. [Sidenote: "National Intelligencer," Feb. 28, 1849.] It may easily be imagined that a man who, after being elected a Senator of the United States, was capable of the insane insolence of signing his name to a letter informing his defeated competitor that he would have killed him if the result had been different, would not have been likely, when seven years younger, to bear newspaper ridicule with equanimity. His fury against the unknown author of the satire was the subject of much merriment in Springfield, and the next week another letter appeared, from a different hand, but adopting the machinery of the first, in which the widow offered to make up the quarrel by marrying the Auditor, and this, in time, was followed by an epithalamium, in which this happy compromise was celebrated in very bad verses. In the change of hands all the humor of the thing had evaporated, and nothing was left but feminine mischief on one side and the exasperation of wounded vanity on the other.