But the farce was not ended. Mrs. Merry thenceforth eschewed the Presidential mansion, and if her husband went there it was only officially. After the clamor subsided, the President felt a good natured desire to put an end to this frivolous matter, and to relieve the offended dignitaries from the awkwardness of their position. Accordingly he made inquiry through a common friend (the representative, we think, of the Swedish Government), whether Mr. and Mrs. Merry would accept an invitation to a family dinner. The former was understood to give an affirmative answer, and the invitation was sent, written in the President's own hand. The minister replied by addressing the Secretary of State to know whether he was invited in his private or his official capacity: if in the one, he must obtain the permission of his sovereign; if in the other, he must receive an assurance in advance that he would be treated as became his position. The "Secretary of State" put an end to the correspondence in a very dry note; and here. the affair ended.

Mr. Thomas Moore had an individual cause of complaint against the President, the history and consequences of which would be in no way worth repeating except for a characteristic anecdote they chance to furnish of the latter. Moore was, as he remarks, presented to the President by Mr. Merry. He had then published nothing which had crossed the Atlantic but

"gentle Little's moral song

To soothe the mania of the amorous throng."

Mr. Jefferson knew not the "young Catullus of his day:" and had no conception that he stood in the dangerous presence of the hero of Chalk-Farm, or of the wielder of the better-loaded weapons of a clever lampooner. Accordingly, standing stark six feet two inches and a half, and with that cold first look he always cast upon a stranger, the President gazed down on the perfumed little Adonis, spoke to him, and being occupied, gave him no more attention. Moore (then twenty-four) had crossed the Atlantic in the same vessel with Mr. and Mrs. Merry, in October, 1803, and had hardly set foot in the United States before he began to write home his own and Mrs. Merry's intense disgust at everything in the United States. He repaired to Bermuda, where he spent the winter; made his appearance in

Washington in June, 1804; met with the undistinguished reception mentioned; was flattered by Mrs. Merry's sympathizers, and fell to lampooning the President and everything American except a few attentive Federal gentlemen and ladies.'

When his scurrilous attacks on the President were published, they soon fell into the hands of Hon. William A. Burwell, member of Congress from Virginia, the President's former private secretary, and the intimate and devoted friend of himself and his family. Burwell carried the matter to Mrs. Randolph, and even the gentle Martha was roused at these insults coming from a man who had been introduced into society and patronized by the British minister. They talked themselves into a towering indignation, and then agreed that it was proper to place the subject before the President. This took place at Monticello,

We will present the curious in such matters with some specimens selected from a rapid inspection of a few pages, preserving such italicization as we find. Moore wrote his mother, November 7th, 1803:

"This Norfolk, the capital [!] of Virginia, is a most strange place; nothing to be seen in the streets but dogs and negroes, and the few ladies that pass for white are to be sure the most unlovely pieces of crockery I ever set my eyes on. Poor Mrs.

Merry has been as ill treated by the mosquitoes as she has been by every one else. They

have bit her into a fever."

In his letter already quoted in the text (June 13th, 1804), he said:

"I have passed the Potomac, the Rappahannock, the Occoquan, the Potapsio, ard many other rivers, with names as barbarous as the inhabitants; every step I take not only reconciles, but endears to me, not only the excellences but even the errors of Old England. Such a road as I have come! and in such a conveyance! The mail takes twelve passengers, which generally consist of squalling children, stinking negroes, and republicans smoking cigars! How often it has occurred to me that nothing can be more emblematical of the government of this country than its stages, filled with a motley mixture, all hail-fellows-well-met,' driving through mud and filth, which bespatters them as they raise it, and risking an upset at every step. God comfort their capacities! As soon as I am away from them, both the stages and the government may have the same fate for what I care.'

He wrote his mother, June 26th, 1804:

My reception at Philadelphia was extremely flattering and it is the only place in America which can boast any literary society, and my name had prepossessed them more strongly than I deserve. But their affectionate attentions went far beyond this deference to reputation; I was quite caressed while there; and their anxiety to make me known by introductory letters to all their friends on my way, and two or three little poems of a very flattering kind, which some of their choicest men addressed to me, all went so warmly to my heart, that I felt quite a regret in leaving them," etc.

Great was Mr. Moore's disgust at the "philosophic humility" of the American President. He did not like his style of living. The President only occupied "a corner" of his mansion. The " grand edifice" was "encircled by a very rude pale, through which a common rustic stile introduced visitors," etc., etc. The admirer of freedom in his own land was especially disgusted with the President's politics. Here is a moderate speci men from his Epistles, Odes, and other Poems":

"If thou hast got within thy freeborn breast,
One pulse that beats more proudly than the rest,
With honest scorn for that inglorious soul,
Which creeps and winds beneath a mob's control,
Which courts the rabble's smile, the rabble's nod,
And makes, like Egypt, every beast its God!
There in those walls-but burning tongue forbear!
Rank must be reverenced, even the rank that's there:
So here I pause

Mr. Moore did not always "pause" even at this point.

and the latter was sitting reading in his library, serenely unconscious of calamity. Burwell pointed out the obnoxious passages. The victim glanced through them, looked at one angry interlocutor and then the other. It was amusing enough to see Burwell so exasperated; but the calm, gentle Martha's passion-gust was irresistible. Mr. Jefferson broke into a hearty, clear laugh. There was more than argument-there was conviction in that laugh. The indignant pair retreated, looking a little crest-fallen, but as soon as the library door closed, joined heartily in the merriment.

Finally (about 1814 we should say), Moore's Irish Melodies appeared in the United States. Our informant in all these particulars, with some curiosity, put the book into her grandfather's hands. "Why," said he, "this is the little man who satirized me so!" He read along. He had always sympathized keenly with the Irish patriots. The delightful rhythm fell like music on a susceptible ear. He presently exclaimed: "Why, he is a poet after all!" Henceforth the Bard of Erin shared with Burns the honor of being familiarly read by the retired statesman, when Byron, Wordsworth, Southey, Coleridge, Campbell, etc., never could (or at least never did) break through the barriers of his early habits and tastes.'

Some of Moore's songs, like those commencing, "Oh, breathe not his name," "When he who adores thee," and "Oh, blame not the bard," were special favorites; and the last page which Mr. Jefferson's dying hand traced, his farewell to his daughter, contained a quotation of several lines from the one commencing "It is not the tear at this moment shed."

2

1 Mr. Jefferson was fond of Allan Ramsay, Tannahill, and, indeed, nearly all the Scotch song writers, and of both the lyrical and pastoral ballads of every land. This shows that he loved poetry; and was not tied to its earlier schools, with merely such exceptions as we have named in the text. We could point out things in the writings of every one of the poets we have mentioned as rejected by him, which we feel certain, by analogy, he would have admired if he could have been persuaded to read them. But old men learn to disrelish making new literary as well as new personal acquaintances. And we doubt whether there was ever a genuine admirer of Pope, who afterwards fell cordially into the modern school.

He apparently never bestowed a second thought on Moore's pasquinades on himself and the United States. Others did not share in this "philosophic" indifference. The American Eagle has always been a rather thin-skinned bird. John Quincy Adams, writing (in 1809) of some British accusations against us, said: "It is one of those scandalous calumnies which a number of starveling vagabonds in England, which Cobbett, and Moore the minstrel of the brothels, have been for some years administering to the malignant passions of the country." The younger Adams never forgot a grudge. In 1821, when Secretary of State, in a Fourth of July oration delivered at Washington, he exclaimed: "Stand forth, ye champions of Britannia,..... ye spawners of fustian romance and lascivious lyrics." Most will probably consider the "philosophic" taste best. Mr. Moore grew to be a man-but never one to be converted into the antagonist of a nation.

The second session of the eighth Congress convened on the 5th of November. The President's message announced that the commerce of neutral nations on the ocean had suffered less than on former occasions of European war, but that owing to peculiar causes, commerce in the American seas had suffered more; and that infringements on our jurisdiction and laws had even taken place in our own harbors. But the friendly conduct, elsewhere, of the governments from whom these acts proceeded, gave confidence, he declared, that our representations on the subject would be properly regarded.

He said that while noticing the irregularities of others on the ocean, our own ought not to be overlooked or "left unprovided for." Complaints had been received that armed American merchant vessels had attempted to force a commerce into certain ports in defiance of their laws. He continued :

"That individuals should undertake to wage private war, independently of the authority of their country, cannot be permitted in a well ordered society. Its tendency to produce aggression on the laws and rights of other nations, and to endanger the peace of our own, is so obvious, that I doubt not you will adopt measures for restraining it effectually in future."

He explained that Spain had misunderstood the object of the act of the last session, establishing a district and port of entry on the waters of the Mobile, in consequence of which it had suspended the ratification of the treaty of 1802; but explanations of our pacific and unaggressive intentions having been given, that Government had gone so far as to withdraw its objections to the validity of our title to Louisiana-the boundaries, however, yet remaining to be settled.

Having stated the condition of our affairs with the Barbary powers (containing nothing of particular interest), he informed Congress of the steps which had been taken to organize the territories of Orleans, Louisiana, and Indiana.

After speaking of the apparently friendly feelings of the Indians in the newly acquired territory, he remarked :

"By pursuing a uniform course of justice towards them, by aiding them in all the improvements which may better their condition, and especially by establishing a commerce on terms which shall be advantageous to them and only not losing to us, and so regulated as that no incendiaries of our own or any other nation may be permitted to disturb the natural effects of our just and friendly offices, we may ren der ourselves to necessary to their comfort and prosperity, that the protection of

citizens from their disorderly members will become their interest and their voluntary care. Instead, therefore, of an augmentation of military force proportioned to our extension of frontier, I proposed a moderate enlargement of the capital employed in that commerce, as a more effectual, economical, and humane instrument for preserving peace and good neighborhood with them."

He announced that all the country between the Wabash and the Ohio, south of the road from the rapids towards Vincennes, had been purchased of the Delawares, and also, a claim to the same territory of the Piankeshaws, which it had been thought best to "quiet by fair purchase." This territory fronted three hundred miles on the Ohio, and nearly half that length on the Wabash, and with the cession before made by the Kaskaskias, "nearly consolidated our possessions north of the Ohio, in a very respectable breadth, from Lake Erie to the Mississippi."

With a view to preserve our rights as a neutral power, and enforce our jurisdiction within our own waters, the following recommendation was made:

"The act of Congress of February 28th, 1803, for building and employing a number of gunboats, is now in a course of execution to the extent there provided for. The obstacles to naval enterprise which vessels of this construction offer for our seaport towns-their utility towards supporting within our waters the authority of the laws the promptness with which they will be manned by the seamen and militia of the place the moment they are wanting-the facility of their assembling from different parts of the coast to any point where they are required in greater force than ordinary--the economy of their maintenance and preservation from decay when not in actual service-and the competence of our finances to this defensive provision, without any new burden, are considerations which will have due weight with Congress in deciding on the expediency of adding to their number from year to year, as experience shall test their utility, until all our important harbors, by these and auxiliary means shall be ensured against insult and opposition to the laws.”

He declared that no augmentation of the army was required -but that improvements in the militia "would be always seasonable."

Lastly, in regard to the finances, he said that the receipt of eleven millions and a half of dollars during the last fiscal year, has enabled the Government, after meeting ordinary expenses, to pay upwards of $3,600,000 of the public debt exclusive of interest-making, with the two preceding years, a diminution of $12,000,000 of principal, and the payment of a still larger sum in interest. After presenting some estimates for the ensuing year, he thus closed: