Monticello, June 29, 1824.
Dear Sir,
I have to thank you for Mr. Pickering's elaborate philippic against Mr.
Adams, Gerry, Smith, and myself; and I have delayed the acknowledgment
until I could read it and make some observations on it.
I could not have believed, that for so many years, and to such a period
of advanced age, he could have nourished passions so vehement and
viperous. It appears, that for thirty years past, he has been
industriously collecting materials for vituperating the characters he
had marked for his hatred; some of whom certainly, if enmities towards
him had ever existed, had forgotten them all, or buried them in the
grave with themselves. As to myself, there never had been any thing
personal between us, nothing but the general opposition of party
sentiment; and our personal intercourse had been that of urbanity, as
himself says. But it seems he has been all this time brooding over an
enmity which I had never felt, and that with respect to myself, as well
as others, he has been writing far and near, and in every direction, to
get hold of original letters, where he could, copies, where he could
not, certificates and journals, catching at every gossipping story he
could hear of in any quarter, supplying by suspicions what he could find
no where else, and then arguing on this motley farrago, as if
established on gospel evidence. And while expressing his wonder,
'at the age of eighty-eight, the strong passions of Mr.
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