I much fear that the spirit which you have aided to infuse into the army, of criticising their commander and withholding confidence from him, will now turn upon you; and I shall assist you as far as I can to put it down. Neither you nor Napoleon, if he were alive again, could get any good out of an army while such a spirit prevails in it. And now, beware of rashness, but with energy and sleepless vigilance go forward and give us victories. Yours very truly, A. LINCOLN. Some little time afterwards, in referring with much feeling to this letter, General Hooker declared: "It was just such a letter as a father might have addressed to his son. It was a great rebuke, however, to me at the time." The question of a dictatorship had been everywhere ventilated. The President had heard a great deal about it; but he treated the whole subject as a pure vagary, not apprehending any serious danger from it. At first it may have given him some annoyance; but it soon ceased to disturb him, and ultimately it became the source of no little mirth and amusement to him. I was present upon one occasion when a party of the intimate friends of Mr. Lincoln were assembled at the White House, and the project of a dictatorship was the topic of conversation. The President gave full play to the exuberance of his humor and his sense of the ridiculous, entirely banishing the anxieties and apprehensions of such of his friends as were inclined to regard the question from a more serious point of view. "I will tell you," said he, "a story which I think illustrates the situation.