I have delayed this long to acknowledge & thank you for your last consignment of books, in the hope of telling you – what I am now at last enabled to do, that Gifford has finally given up the Q Review, & that, after the forthcoming number

it will be under John Coleridge’s management. This is a matter which I have had very much at heart, that there might be an end of that mischievous language concerning your country. I opposed it always with all my might, & forced in that paper upon Dwights Travels,

– yet in the very next number the old system was renewed!

– This was the effect of poor Giffords own temper; – & you may be assured that it has occasiond almost as much disgust here, as in America. So far is it from being the language, or the wish of Government, that one of the Cabinet ministers

complained of it to me as most mischievous, & most opposite to the course which they were desirous of pursuing. There is an end of it now. & henceforth that journal will do all in its power towards establishing that feeling which ought to exist between the two nations. Let me be peace-maker; & use what influence you have that the right hand of good will may be accepted as frankly as it is offered.

I know not what the forthcoming number may contain. But I can answer for the Review afterwards. A friend of mine, (Hughes who wrote a pleasant book about the South of France)

is preparing a paper upon your literature, – & Buckminsters Sermons

are reprinting at my suggestion.

Now then let me thank you for Philips War,

so long desired, – for G Fox digged out of his Burrows,

& their companions. These Quaker books are very curious, – it is out of such rubbish that I have to pick out the whole materials for my intended edifice; & good materials they are, when they are found. – Before this reaches you I shall have finished the Tale of Paraguay,

which has hung like a mill stone about my neck, owing to the difficulty which the stanza occasioned. As soon as I am rid of it, I shall take up the New England poem

as a regular employment, & work on with it steadily to the end. A third part is done; – I am not making a hero of Philip,

as it now seems the fashion to represent him. In my story the question between the settlers & the natives will is very fairly represented, without any disposition either to favour the cause of savage life against civilization, or to dissemble the injuries which trading colonists (as well as military ones) have always committed upon people in an inferior grade of society to themselves. Better characters than the history affords me, or to speak more accurately, characters more capable of serving the purposes of poetry, I need not desire. The facts are not quite so manageable, – I may say as a xxxx friend of mine heard Bertrand de Moleville

say when after relating a story he was told that the facts were not as he had stated them. Ah Monsieur! tant pis pour les faits.

So I must deal with them in fiction – as a Frenchman deals with facts in history, that is xxxxxxx take as little truth, & mingle it with as much invention, as suits my object. To what an extent the French do this, I should hardly have thought credible, – if I had not daily evidence in their memoirs upon the Peninsular War, comparing them with the undeniable documents in my hands. – My second volume

is pretty far advanced in the press, & I hope to send it you in the spring, – together with the Paraguay poem.

My niece desires me to thank you for that sweet story of Undine,

– which is surely the most graceful fiction of modern times. – Some other pieces of the same author have been translated here, all bearing marks of the same originality & genius.

Wordsworth was with me lately, in good health, – & we talked of you. His brother, the Master of Trinity, has just published a volume concerning the Εἰκὼν Βασιλική,

a question of no trifling importance both to our political & literary history. As far as minute & accumulative evidence can amount to proof, he has proved it to be genuine. For myself I have never, since I read the book, thought that any unprejudiced person could entertain a doubt concerning it. I am the more gratified that this full & satisfactory investigation has been made, xxxx because it grew out of a conversation between the two Wordsworths & myself, at Rydal, a year or two ago.

Remember me to all my Boston friends, – it is a pleasure to think I have so many xxxxy there. The only American whom I have seen this year, is Bishop Hobart of New York.