Anecdotes of public men; by John W. Forney.

392 ANECDOTES OF PUBLIC MEN.
Reluctant to undertake a public tour while President, he
seems to have had pretty much the notion of Washington, in
that respect, that our people have of Grant:
"WASHINGTON, June I9, I807.
"To Governor Sullivan:
" With respect to the tour my friends to the North have proposed that I
should make in that quarter, I have not made up my final opinion. The
course of life which General Washington had run, civil and military, the
services he had rendered, and the space he therefore occupied in the affections of his fellow-citizens, take from his examples the weight of precedents
for others, because no others can arrogate to themselves the claims which
he had on the public homage."
ON CIVIL SERVICE.
"WASHINGTON, July I7, I807.
"I have never removed a man merely because he was a Federalist. I
have never wished them to give a vote at an election but according to their
own wishes. But, as no Government could discharge its duties to the best
advantage of its citizens if its agents were in a regular course of thwarting
instead of executing all its measures, and were employing the patronage and
influences of their offices against the Government and its measures, I have
only requested they would be quiet, and they should be safe."
GLAD TO GET RID OF THE PRESIDENCY.
"WASHINGTON, March 2, I809.
"To -M. Dz5ont de Nemours:
"Never did a prisoner, released from chains, feel such relief as I shall on
shaking off the shackles of power. Nature intended me for the tranquil
pursuits of science, by rendering them my supreme delight; but the enormities of the times in which I have lived have forced me to take a part in resisting them, and to commit myself on the boisterous ocean of political passions."
In his Memoirs he often sketches his associates and contemporaries. John Adams is " vain and irritable," but as "disinterested as the being who made him." Pendleton, of Virginia, "the ablest man in debate I have ever met," "without
the poetic fancy of Mr. Patrick Henry, his sublime imagination,
or his lofty and overwhelming diction." He was in love with
lames Madison, "who never wandered from his subject into