“And on all occasions, both now and formerly, I have done you the justice to tell that you made an offer of returning the plate very soon after your return to Brest; and although you yourself was not at my house, but remained at the shore with your boat, that you had your officers and men in such extraordinary good discipline, that your having given them the strictest orders to behave well, to do no injury of any kind, to make no search, but only to bring off what plate was given them; that in reality they did exactly as ordered, and that not one man offered to stir from his post on the outside of the house, nor entered the doors, nor said an uncivil word; that the two officers staid not a quarter of an hour in the parlor and in the butler’s pantry, while the butler got the plate together, behaved politely, and asked for nothing but the plate, and instantly marched their men off, in regular order, and that both officers and men behaved in all respects so well that it would have done credit to the best disciplined troops whatever.” The style of Captain Jones’s letter has been found fault with. But in literary excellence it is certainly above that of the English lord. One of the London papers said of him: “Paul Jones is about thirty-six years of age, of a middling stature, well proportioned, with an agreeable countenance. His conversation shows him to be a man of talents, and that he has a liberal education. His letters, in foreign gazettes, show that he can fight with the pen as well as with the sword.” In the letter which Captain Jones sent to Lord Selkirk upon the return of the plate, he wrote: “The long delay that has happened to the restoration of your plate, has given me much concern, and I now feel a proportionate pleasure in fulfilling what was my first intention. My motive for landing at your estate in Scotland was to take _you_, as a hostage for the lives and liberties of a number of the citizens of America, who had been taken in war on the ocean and committed to British prisons, under an act of Parliament, as _traitors_, _pirates_, and _felons_. You observed to Mr. Alexander that my idea was a mistaken one, because you were not, as I had supposed, in favor with the British ministry, who knew _that you favored the cause of liberty_. On that account, I am glad that you were absent from your estate when I landed there, as I bore no personal enmity, but the contrary, toward you. I afterward had the happiness to redeem my fellow-citizens from Britain, by means far more glorious than through the medium of any single hostage.