I could not have believed, that for so many years, and to such a period of advanced age, he could have nourished passions so vehement and viperous.  It appears, that for thirty years past, he has been industriously collecting materials for vituperating the characters he had marked for his hatred; some of whom certainly, if enmities towards him had ever existed, had forgotten them all, or buried them in the grave with themselves.  As to myself, there never had been any thing personal between us, nothing but the general opposition of party sentiment; and our personal intercourse had been that of urbanity, as himself says.  But it seems he has been all this time brooding over an enmity which I had never felt, and that with respect to myself, as well as others, he has been writing far and near, and in every direction, to get hold of original letters, where he could, copies, where he could not, certificates and journals, catching at every gossipping story he could hear of in any quarter, supplying by suspicions what he could find no where else, and then arguing on this motley farrago, as if established on gospel evidence.  And while expressing his wonder, ’at the age of eighty-eight, the strong passions of Mr. Adams should not have cooled ’; that on the contrary, ’they had acquired the mastery of his soul,’ (p. 100 ;) that ’where these were enlisted, no reliance could be placed on his statements,’ (p. 104 ;) the facility and little truth with which he could represent facts and occurrences, concerning persons who were the objects of his hatred, (p. 3 ;) that ’he is capable of making the grossest misrepresentations, and, from detached facts, and often from bare suspicions, of drawing unwarrantable inferences,’ if suited to his purpose at the instant,’ (p. 174;) while making such charges, I say, on Mr. Adams, instead of his ‘ecce homo,’ (p. 100;) how justly might we say to him, ’Mutato nomine, de te fabula narratur.’  For the assiduity and industry he has employed in his benevolent researches after matter of crimination against us, I refer to his pages 13, 14, 34, 36, 46, 71, 79, 90, bis. 92, 93, bis. 101, ter. 104, 116, 118, 141, 143, 146,150,151,153, 168, 171, 172.  That Mr. Adams’s strictures on him, written and pointed, should have excited some notice on his part, was not perhaps to be wondered at.  But the sufficiency of his motive for the large attack on me may be more questionable.  He says, (p. 4) ’of Mr. Jefferson I should have said nothing, but for his letter to Mr. Adams, of October the 12th, 1823.’  Now the object of that letter was to soothe the feelings of a friend, wounded by a publication which I thought an ’outrage on private confidence.’  Not a word or allusion in it respecting Mr. Pickering, nor was it suspected that it would draw forth his pen in justification of this infidelity, which he has, however, undertaken in the course of his pamphlet, but more particularly in its conclusion.