MY DEAR SIR,--Your letter of the 31st ult. is just received at 5 P.M. for I have just returned from the President's. I feel the blush of genuine shame at the apparent presumption of adding my name in favor of the magazine to that of the eminent gentlemen at Princeton. This is real and unaffected--but you desire it--and I dare follow your beck in any direction. Would that I could in one still more important. Holingshead's History of Duncan of Scotland, is under copy by my Elizabeth (my daughter, once your pet) for the purpose of showing the full basis of Shakspeare's Macbeth. I think you will be pleased with it--and the readers of Shakspeare must differ much from me, if they do not find it very interesting. If you suppose from what I said of nine o'clock that that is my hour of going to bed on _week-day nights_, you are mistaken by several hours. For some time past, I have been obliged to be in my office before breakfast, and till nine or ten o'clock at night, when I have to come home, take my tea, talk over family affairs, and get to bed between eleven and twelve; but it is killing me also. And as death would be most extremely inconvenient to me in more respects than one, at this time, I shall quit that course of operations, and look a little to my health, if I can survive the approaching Supreme Court--_sed quære de hoc_. My troubles not being already enough, in the estimation of the honorable body now assembled in the Capitol, they are beginning to institute inquiries, for my better amusement, into the circumstances of three fees paid me by the government, in the course of the four years that I have been here, for professional services foreign to my official duties--a thing which has been continually done at all times, under this government, but which they affect to think a new affair entirely, and only an additional proof among ten thousand others of the waste of public money, by the rapacity, if not peculation, of those in office. I am sick of public life; my skin is too thin for the business; a politician should have the hide of a rhinoceros, to bear the thrusts of the folly, ignorance, and meanness of those who are disposed to mount into momentary consequence by questioning _their betters_, if I may be excused the expression after professing my modesty. "There's nought but care on every hand;" all, all is vanity and vexation of spirit, save religion, friendship, and literature. I agree that your story of the _Oysterman_ is the best, but I {52} suspect that the Orange story is the true original. I knew old Bletcher: _he_ was a _Baptist_ preacher; and although I did not hear the words, they are so much in his character that I verily believe them to have been uttered by him; and it would have been quite in his character too to have gone on with the amplification you suggest.