This has occasioned some lapses of recollection, and a confusion of some things in the mind of our friend, and particularly as to the volume of slanders supposed to have been cut out of newspapers and preserved.  It would not, indeed, have been a single volume, but an Encyclopaedia in bulk.  But I never had such a volume; indeed, I rarely thought those libels worth reading, much less preserving and remembering.  At the end of every year, I generally sorted all my pamphlets, and had them bound according to their subjects.  One of these volumes consisted of personal altercations between individuals, and calumnies on each other.  This was lettered on the back, ‘Personalities,’ and is now in the library of Congress.  I was in the habit, also, while living apart from my family, of cutting out of the newspapers such morsels of poetry, or tales, as I thought would please, and of sending them to my grandchildren, who pasted them on leaves of blank paper and formed them into a book.  These two volumes have been confounded into one in the recollection of our friend.  Her poetical imagination, too, has heightened the scenes she visited, as well as the merits of the inhabitants, to whom her society was a delightful gratification.

I have just finished reading O’Meara’s Bonaparte.  It places him in a higher scale of understanding than I had allotted him.  I had thought him the greatest of all military captains, but an indifferent statesman, and misled by unworthy passions.  The flashes, however, which escaped from him in these conversations with O’Meara, prove a mind of great expansion, although not of distinct developement and reasoning.  He seizes results with rapidity and penetration, but never explains logically the process of reasoning by which he arrives at them.  This book, too, makes us forget his atrocities for a moment, in commiseration of his sufferings.  I will not say that the authorities of the world, charged with the care of their country and people, had not a right to confine him for life, as a lion or tiger, on the principles of self-preservation.  There was no safety to nations while he was permitted to roam at large.  But the putting him to death in cold blood, by lingering tortures of mind, by vexations, insults, and deprivations, was a degree of inhumanity to which the poisonings and assassinations of the school of Borgia and the den of Marat never attained.  The book proves, also, that nature had denied him the moral sense, the first excellence of well-organized man.  If he could seriously and repeatedly affirm, that he had raised himself to power without ever having committed a crime, it proves that he wanted totally the sense of right and wrong.  If he could consider the millions of human lives which he had destroyed or caused to be destroyed, the desolations of countries by plunderings, burnings, and famine, the destitutions of lawful rulers of the world without the consent of their constituents, to place his brothers and sisters