"France I could not, at present, visit with advantage; that is to say for, perhaps, a year. Mr. Allston thinks I ought to be previously well grounded in the principles of the English school to resist the corruptions of the French school; for they are corrupt in the principles of painting, as in religion and everything else; but, when well grounded in the good principles of this school, I could study and select the few beauties of the French without being in danger of following their many errors. The Louvre also would, in about a year, be of the greatest advantage to me, and also the fine works in Italy.... "Mama has amused me very much in her letter where she writes on politics. She says that, next to changing one's religion, she would dislike a man for changing his politics. Mama, perhaps, is not aware that she would in this way shut the door completely to conviction in anything. It would imply that, because a man is educated in error, he must forever live in error. I know exactly how mama feels; she thinks, as I did when at home, that it was impossible for the Federalists to be in the wrong; but, as all men are fallible, I think they may stand a chance of being wrong as well as any other class of people.... "Mama thinks my '_error_' arises from wrong information. I will ask mama which of us is likely to get at the truth; I, who am in England and can see and hear all their motives for acting as they have done; or mama, who gets her information from the Federal papers, second-hand, with numerous additions and improvements made to answer party purposes, distorted and misrepresented? "But to give you an instance. In the Massachusetts remonstrance they attribute the repeal of the Orders in Council to the kind disposition of the English Government, and a wish on their part to do justice, whereas it is notorious in this country that they repealed them on account of the injury it was doing themselves, and took America into consideration about as much as they did the inhabitants of Kamschatka. The conditional repeal of the Berlin and Milan decrees was a back door for them, and they availed themselves of it to sneak out of it. This necessity, this act of dire necessity, the Federal papers cry up as evincing a most forbearing spirit towards us, and really astonish the English themselves who never dreamt that it could be twisted in that way.