Nevertheless, these pages of Marshall's do not lack acute historical judgments. He points out, for instance, that, if the Revolution had ended before the Articles of Confederation were adopted, permanent disunion might have ensued and that, faulty as it was, the Confederation "preserved the idea of Union until the good sense of the Nation adopted a more efficient system." Again, in his account of the events leading up to the Convention of 1787, Marshall rightly emphasizes facts which subsequent writers have generally passed by with hardly any mention, so that students may read this work with profit even today. But the chief importance of these volumes lay, after all, in the additional power which the author himself derived from the labor of their preparation. In so extensive an undertaking Marshall received valuable training for his later task of laying the foundations of Constitutional Law in America. One of his chief assets on the bench, as we have already seen, was his complete confidence in his own knowledge of the intentions of the Constitution--a confidence which was grounded in the consciousness that he had written the history of the Constitution's framing. Most of Marshall's correspondence, which is not voluminous, deals with politics or legal matters. But there are letters in which the personal side of the Chief Justice is revealed. He gives his friend Story a touching account of the loss of two of his children. He praises old friends and laments his inability to make new ones. He commends Jane Austen, whose novels he has just finished reading. "Her flights," he remarks, "are not lofty, she does not soar on eagle's wings, but she is pleasing, interesting, equable, and yet amusing." He laments that he "can no longer debate and yet cannot apply his mind to anything else." One recalls Darwin's similar lament that his scientific work had deprived him of all liking for poetry. The following letter, which Marshall wrote the year before his death to his grandson, a lad of fourteen or fifteen, is interesting for its views on a variety of subjects and is especially pleasing for its characteristic freedom from condescension: I had yesterday the pleasure of receiving your letter of the 29th of November, and am quite pleased with the course of study you are pursuing. Proficiency in Greek and Latin is indispensable to an accomplished scholar, and may be of great real advantage in our progress through human life. Cicero deserves to be studied still more for his talents than for the improvement in language to be derived from reading him. He was unquestionably, with the single exception of Demosthenes, the greatest orator among the ancients. He was too a profound Philosopher. His "de officiis" is among the most valuable treatises I have ever seen in the Latin language.