However, having thrown down his first
thoughts in the form of a letter, and, indeed, when he sat down to
write, having intended it for a private letter, he found it difficult
to change the form of address when his sentiments had grown into a
greater extent and had received another direction. A different plan,
he is sensible, might be more favorable to a commodious division and
distribution of his matter.
DEAR SIR,
You are pleased to call again, and with some earnestness, for my
thoughts on the late proceedings in France. I will not give you reason
to imagine that I think my sentiments of such value as to wish
myself to be solicited about them. They are of too little
consequence to be very anxiously either communicated or withheld. It
was from attention to you, and to you only, that I hesitated at the
time when you first desired to receive them. In the first letter I had
the honor to write to you, and which at length I send, I wrote neither
for, nor from, any description of men, nor shall I in this. My errors,
if any, are my own. My reputation alone is to answer for them.
You see, Sir, by the long letter I have transmitted to you, that
though I do most heartily wish that France may be animated by a spirit
of rational liberty, and that I think you bound, in all honest policy,
to provide a permanent body in which that spirit may reside, and an
effectual organ by which it may act, it is my misfortune to
entertain great doubts concerning several material points in your late
transactions.
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