The box containing your books & papers is safely arrived, & I shall immediately begin to peruse them.

The use which I shall make of them will, I hope, express my sense of this favour better than I feel myself able here to do. They will enable me to rewrite that portion of my history in which I was most in want of satisfactory documents. Their bulk is by no means alarming. It has often been my duty to go thro more bulky materials, in investigating subjects in themselves less interesting, & much less momentous. If there be any point which may seem to require farther explanation, I will avail myself of your permission, as conveyed to me by M^r B. Frere, & apply for it.

I am at this time preparing for the press that chapter which relates to the campaign in Portugal.

On this subject I hope it will be found that I shall have written in a manner which you Sir, will think satisfactory, & which will not be discreditable to myself. No man who has lived to any purpose can reach the verge of fifty without reconsidering some of his opinions, & modifying or changing them, as the same things appear to him in new & different lights. Were I to begin life again, & with a proper knowledge of myself, the fault which I should be most desirous to correct would be that of taking expressing up with too much warmth & vehemence opinions which had been taken up with too little consideration.