amuse you with Vienna matters.  What is it to you that we had a very pleasant dinner-party last week at Prince Esterhazy’s, and another this week at Prince Liechtenstein’s, and that to-morrow I am to put on my cocked hat and laced coat to make a visit to her Imperial Majesty, the Empress Mother, and that to-night there is to be the first of the assembly balls, the Vienna Almack’s, at which—­I shall be allowed to absent myself altogether?

It strikes me that there is likely to be left a fair field for us a few months longer, say till midsummer.  The Trent affair I shall not say much about, except to state that I have always been for giving up the prisoners.  I was awfully afraid, knowing that the demand had gone forth,—­

        “Send us your prisoners or you’ll hear of it,”

   that the answer would have come back in the Hotspur vein—­

       ’And if the Devil come and roar for them,
        We will not send them.”

The result would have been most disastrous, for in order to secure a most trifling advantage,—­that of keeping Mason and Slidell at Fort Warren a little longer,—­we should have turned our backs on all the principles maintained by us when neutral, and should have been obliged to accept a war at an enormous disadvantage. . . .

But I hardly dared to hope that we should have obtained such a victory as we have done.  To have disavowed the illegal transaction at once,—­before any demand came from England,—­to have placed that disavowal on the broad ground of principle which we have always cherished, and thus with a clear conscience, and to our entire honor, to have kept ourselves clear from a war which must have given the Confederacy the invincible alliance of England,—­was exactly what our enemies in Europe did not suppose us capable of doing.  But we have done it in the handsomest manner, and there is not one liberal heart in this hemisphere that is not rejoiced, nor one hater of us and of our institutions that is not gnashing his teeth with rage.

The letter of ten close pages from which I have quoted these passages is full of confidential information, and contains extracts from letters of leading statesmen.  If its date had been 1762, I might feel authorized in disobeying its injunctions of privacy.  I must quote one other sentence, as it shows his animus at that time towards a distinguished statesman of whom he was afterwards accused of speaking in very hard terms by an obscure writer whose intent was to harm him.  In speaking of the Trent affair, Mr. Motley says:  “The English premier has been foiled by our much maligned Secretary of State, of whom, on this occasion at least, one has the right to say, with Sir Henry Wotton,—­

       ’His armor was his honest thought,
        And simple truth his utmost skill.’”

“He says at the close of this long letter: