The history of our University you know so far.  Seven of the ten pavilions destined for the Professors, and about thirty dormitories, will be completed this year, and three others, with six hotels for boarding, and seventy other dormitories, will be completed the next year, and the whole be in readiness then to receive those who are to occupy them.  But means to bring these into place, and to set the machine into motion, must come from the legislature.  An opposition, in the mean time, has been got up.  That of our alma mater, William and Mary, is not of much weight.  She must descend into the secondary rank of academies of preparation for the University.  The serious enemies are the priests of the different religious sects, to whose spells on the human mind its improvement is ominous.  Their pulpits are now resounding with denunciations against the appointment of Doctor Cooper, whom they charge as a monotheist in opposition to their tritheism.  Hostile as these sects are, in every other point, to one another, they unite in maintaining their mystical theogony against those who believe there is one God only.  The Presbyterian clergy are loudest; the most intolerant of all sects, the most tyrannical and ambitious; ready at the word of the lawgiver, if such a word could be now obtained, to put the torch to the pile, and to rekindle in this virgin hemisphere the flames in which their oracle Calvin consumed the poor Servetus, because, he could not find in his Euclid the proposition which has demonstrated that three are one, and one is three, nor subscribe to that of Calvin, that magistrates have a right to exterminate all heretics to Calvinistic creed.  They pant to re-establish, by law, that holy inquisition, which they can now only infuse into public opinion.  We have most unwisely committed to the hierophants of our particular superstition the direction of public opinion, that lord of the universe.  We have given them stated and privileged days to collect and catechize us, opportunities of delivering their oracles to the people in mass, and of moulding their minds as wax in the hollow of their hands.  But in despite of their fulminations against endeavors to enlighten the general mind, to improve the reason of the people, and encourage them in the use of it, the liberality of this State will support this institution, and give fair play to the cultivation of reason.  Can you ever find a more eligible occasion of visiting once more your native country, than that of accompanying Mr. Correa, and of seeing with him this beautiful and hopeful institution in ovo.

Although I had laid down as a law to myself, never to write, talk, or even think of politics, to know nothing of public affairs, and therefore had ceased to read newspapers, yet the Missouri question aroused and filled me with alarm.  The old schism of federal and republican threatened nothing, because it existed in every State, and united them together by the fraternism of party.  But the coincidence of a marked principle,