MY DEAR SIR WILLIAM,--For a prince you are in letter-writing, and you can call me Lord Orville, for I have a birthright claim to that title.{17} Excuse this capricole of my pen; it has been drawing hard enough at a sermon all the morning, and can't help cutting a caper when it is let out. You won't get the due return for your good long letter this time, nor ever, I think. I am taking comfort in the good long letters that are going with mine, and of whose sending by this conveyance I am the cause. {FN 17: He was named after Lord Orville, the hero of Miss Burney's "Evelina," which his mother had read with delight shortly before his birth.} This conveyance is Miss Searle; and if you and Mrs. Ware don't cultivate her, or let her cultivate you, your folly will be inconceivable. Mrs. Jameson I have missed two or three chances of seeing,--very bright sometimes, and very foolish others; but who shall resist such intoxicating draughts as have for some years been offered to her! She set off for Canada yesterday, going for her husband, since he could n't or would n't come for her. Ingham has just finished one of the most exquisite portraits of Miss Sedgwick that eye ever saw. Did you see anything of it before you went? Furness ['s book] is selling much, and I hear nothing but admiration, save the usual quaver in the song about the part on miracles. Apropos, . . . I think that the explication of the miracles must be a moot and not a test point, and I would not break with the [161] "Christian Examiner" upon it; and yet I think the heterodox opinions of Ripley should have come into it in the shape of a letter, and not of a review. It is rather absurd to say "We" with such confidence, and that for opinions in conflict with the whole course of the "Examiner" and the known opinions of almost all its supporters. . . . Yours forever and a day, ORVILLE DEWEY. To the Same. NEW YORK, May. 2, 1837. . . . A WEEK ago to-day I sat down at my desk, spread before me a sheet of paper, grasped my pen energetically, and had almost committed myself for a letter to you, when suddenly it occurred to me that Mrs. Schuyler was in Boston, and would have told you just what it was my special design to write; that is, all about the congregation of the faithful in Chambers Street. Well, I suppose she has; but I shall have my say. The congregation has certainly not improved, as you seem, in your preposterous modesty, to suppose, but suffered by your leaving it. The attendance, I should think, is about the same. . . . But I am afraid that the society is gradually losing strength.