“your extraordinary fortitude with new wonder at every new misfortune.  Often, after reflecting on this subject, you appear to me so superior, so elevated above all other men; I contemplate you with such a strange mixture of humility, admiration, reverence, love, and pride, that very little superstition would be necessary to make me worship you as a superior being; such enthusiasm does your character excite in me.  When I afterward revert to myself, how insignificant do my best qualities appear!  My vanity would be greater if I had not been placed so near you; and yet my pride is our relationship.  I had rather not live than not be the daughter of such a man.”

Mr. Madison was President then.  In other days her father had been on terms of peculiar intimacy with Madison and his beautiful and accomplished wife.  Burr, in his later years, used to say that it was he who had brought about the match which made Mrs. Madison an inmate of the Presidential mansion.  With the members of Madison’s Cabinet, too, he had been socially and politically familiar.  When Theodosia perceived that her father had no longer a hope of success in his Mexican project, she became anxious for his return to America.  But against this was the probability that the Administration would again arrest him and bring him to trial for the third time.  Theodosia ventured to write to her old friend, Albert Gallatin, Secretary of the Treasury, asking him to interpose on her father’s behalf.  A letter still more interesting than this has recently come to light.  It was addressed by Theodosia to Mrs. Madison.  The coldest heart cannot read this eloquent and pathetic production without emotion.  She writes:—­

“MADAM,—­You may perhaps be surprised at receiving a letter from one with whom you have had so little intercourse for the last few years.  But your surprise will cease when you recollect that my father, once your friend, is now in exile; and that the President only can restore him to me and his country.

“Ever since the choice of the people was first declared in favor of Mr. Madison, my heart, amid the universal joy, has beat with the hope that I, too, should soon have reason to rejoice.  Convinced that Mr. Madison would neither feel nor judge from the feelings or judgment of others, I had no doubt of his hastening to relieve a man whose character he had been enabled to appreciate during a confidential intercourse of long continuance, and whom [he] must know incapable of the designs attributed to him.  My anxiety on this subject, has, however, become too painful to be alleviated by anticipations which no events have yet tended to justify; and in this state of intolerable suspense I have determined to address myself to you, and request that you will, in my name, apply to the President for a removal of the prosecution now existing against AARON BURR.  I still expect it from him as a man of feeling and candor, as one