“His principal excellence is considered composition, design, and elegant grouping; and his faults were said to be a hard and harsh outline and bad coloring.  These faults he has of late in a great degree amended.  His outline is softer and his coloring, in some pictures in which he has attempted truth of color, is not surpassed by any artist now living, and some have even said that Titian himself did not surpass it.  However that may be, his pictures of a late date are admirable even in this particular, and it evinces that, if in general he neglected that fascinating branch of art in some of his paintings, he still possesses a perfect knowledge of all its artifices.  He has just completed a picture, an historical landscape, which, for clearness of coloring combined with grandeur of composition, has never been excelled.

“In his private character he is unimpeachable.  He is a man of tender feelings, but of a mind so noble that it soars above the slanders of his enemies, and he expresses pity rather than revenge towards those who, through wantonness or malice, plan to undermine his character.  No man, perhaps, ever passed through so much abuse, and none, I am confident, ever bore up against its virulence with more nobleness of spirit, with a steady perseverance in the pursuit of the sublimest of human professions.  He has travelled on heedless of the sneers, the ridicule, or the detraction of his enemies, and he has arrived at that point where the lustre of his works will not fail to illuminate the dark regions of barbarism and distaste long after their bright author has ceased to exist.

“Excuse my fervor in the praise of this man.  He is not a common man, not such a one as can be met with in every age.  He is one of those geniuses who are doomed in their lifetime to endure the malice, the ridicule, and neglect of the world, and at their death to receive the praise and adoration of this same inconsistent world.  I think there cannot be a stronger proof that human nature is always the same than that men of genius in all ages have been compelled to undergo the same disappointments and to pass through the same routine of calumny and abuse.”

The rest of this letter is missing, which is a great pity, as it would be interesting to read what Morse had to say of Allston, Leslie, and the others.

Was it a presentiment of the calumnies and abuse to which he himself was to be subjected in after life which led him to express himself so heartily in sympathy with his master West?  And was it the inspiring remembrance of his master’s calm bearing under these afflictions which heartened him to maintain a noble serenity under even greater provocation?

“April 21, 1812. I mentioned in my last letter that I should probably exceed my allowance this year by a few pounds, but I now begin to think that I shall not.  I am trying every method to be economical and hope it will not be long before I shall relieve you from further expense on my account....