... I have very much recovered my spirits, and feel ready to continue my exertions to extricate ourselves. I think we have well-grounded hopes to do it within a reasonable time, and your last letter on the success of the last blast, although it does not dazzle me, induces me to believe that we may not finally be losers by those glass-works which have caused me so much anxiety and have so much contributed to involving us in our difficulties. You ask, "Who _is_ Curtius?" Poor fellow! I am afraid by this time I can only inform you who he was. For by the last post from Petersburg, in Virginia, we hear that he was on the point of death by a pleurisy, and no hopes left of his recovery. His name was John Thompson, his age only twenty-three, too young to be Giles's successor in the ensuing Congress, but would have undoubtedly been elected in the following one. One of the brightest geniuses of Virginia and the United States; spoke with as much eloquence as he wrote, and remarkable for extensive information and immense assiduity. His loss will be as severe to the Republican interest as any we have yet felt. I never saw him, and he knew me only from report and from my political conduct.... 1st March, 1799. ... I have been overwhelmed with business since my last to you. I have been obliged to correct for the press two speeches on the navy, which I enclose; you will find, however, that they are not _written_ by me but by Gales, and although correct in point of sense are not so as to style. I have also written one on the subject of the alien bill, and in addition to that I have had our goods to select and sundry political meetings to attend on the subject of our next election for governor. Thos. McKean is to be our man, and James Ross the other.... Do you want a dish of politics till I see you? The President nominated Mr. Murray minister to France with powers to treat, with instructions that he should not go from Holland to Paris until he should have received assurances of being met by a similar envoy; and he sent along with it a letter from Talleyrand to the secretary of the French legation at the Hague, in which, referring to some former conversations of the secretary with Murray, he added that they would lead to a treaty, and that the French government were ready to admit any American envoy as the representative of a free, great, and independent nation. Murray, I guess, wanted to make himself a greater man than he is by going to France and treating, and wrote privately, it is said, to the President on the subject. The President, without consulting any of his Secretaries, made the nomination. The whole party were prodigiously alarmed. Porcupine and Fenno abused the old gentleman. The nomination instead of being approved was in the Senate committed to a select committee. They then attacked so warmly the President that he sent a new nomination of Ellsworth, P. Henry, and Murray, and none of them to go