"I suppose if Bancroft is confirmed you will get on finely with the Renshaw business. There will be nothing to call you home in some days. "Yours truly, "N. J. W. "_S. J. Tilden, Esq._" TILDEN TO---- "HUDSON, _March 17, 1845_. "MY DEAR SIR,--An hour or so before I left Washington I learned of an act of my friend O'Sullivan which gave me some annoyance and which I intended at once to explain to you. I should have done so before except for a rapid current of business which hurried me here. "You might, fairly enough, perhaps, suppose that O'S.'s act, although not instigated by me, was induced by his knowledge of my views. But such an inference would be unjust to me. I suppose the thing was suggested to him by two circumstances. First, his knowledge that Mr. Croswell had, in December, proposed it to me with some urgency, and, as (after casting about to discover his motive for a proposition which had until then never been presented to my own mind) I concluded to interest myself in behalf of Gov. Marcy for a Cabinet appointment, which I had at the time declined to do. Second, the arrival the night before of a gentleman from New York who said that my name had been discussed--in highly respectable quarters certainly--in reference to the Collectorship. In reply to some remarks of O'S. afterwards, I said that even if that idea had been seriously entertained I should not desire the place both from inadequacy to its physical labor and aversion to its hangman's duty at the present time. In that connection, the other place was spoken of as free from these objections and nearly as advantageous to me personally, and in reference to the political administration, as the Collectorship; but I said, that while the large value and light labor of it would be attractive, I should hesitate to take it, even if it were offered to me, which I certainly did not expect, from reluctance to hold a mere _pecuniary_, professional office, and to surrender or so far postpone my professional pursuits. I did not, I suppose, decide the question, because spoken of casually, as it was, I had no thought that it was, or was ever to become, a case to be decided. "The moment I learned what O'S. had done, I told him that it was wrong--that you and Mr. V. B. ought, in no case, to make any recommendations until the Collectorship was settled and settled properly, because it might, on some pretence or claim of apportionment between the different sections of the party, embarrass that case. I should have written on my way back to that effect had not Gen. Dix, whom I saw just as I was starting, told me he had done so.