Four days later President Madison, who, with his wife, was Browere’s next subject, writes: “A bust of Mr. Jefferson, taken by Mr. Browere from the person of Mr. Jefferson, has been submitted to our inspection and appears to be a faithful likeness.” That Jefferson did suffer some inconvenience, from the application of the wet material, is undeniable. Three [Illustration: THOMAS JEFFERSON Age 82] days after the taking of the mould he wrote to Madison: “I was taken in by Mr. Browere. He said his operation would be of about twenty minutes and less unpleasant than Houdon’s method. I submitted without enquiry. But it was a bold experiment, on his part, on the health of an octogenary worn down by sickness as well as age. Successive coats of thin grout plastered on the naked head and kept there an hour, would have been a severe trial of a young and hale man.” But the newspapers had gotten hold of the “suffocation” and “shattering” story, and any one familiar with the newspapers of that day knows what a scarcity of news there was. Therefore the press over the land laid the Virginia papers tribute for this bit of sensationalism. Richmond, Boston and New York vied with each other in keeping the ball moving. But “those teachers of disjointed thinking,” as Dr. Rush called the public press, were getting too rabid for Browere, so he published, in the Boston “Daily Advertiser” of November 30, 1825, a two-column letter, in which he calls the attack by the “Richmond Enquirer,” the most virulent of his assailants, “a libel false in almost all its parts and which I am now determined to prove so by laying before the public every circumstance relating to that operation on our revered ex-president, Thomas Jefferson.” A copy of this published letter Browere sent to Jefferson under cover of the following important but effusive epistle: NEW YORK, May 20, 1826. _Most Esteemed and venerable Sir_: