of learning, it would never have been paid.  It is to be hoped, therefore, that the displeasure incurred by wringing it from them at the last session, will now give way to a contrary feeling, and even place us on a ground of some merit.  Should this sentiment take place, and the arrival of our Professors, and filling our dormitories with students on the 1st of February, encourage them to look more favorably towards us, perhaps it might dispose them to enlarge somewhat their order on the same fund.  You observe the Proctor has stated in a letter accompanying our Report, that it will take about twenty-five thousand dollars more than we have to finish the Rotunda.  Besides this, an Anatomical theatre (costing about as much as one of our hotels, say about five thousand dollars,) is indispensable to the school of Anatomy.  There cannot be a single dissection until a proper theatre is prepared, giving an advantageous view of the operation to those within, and effectually excluding observation from without.  Either the additional sums, therefore, of twenty-five thousand and five thousand dollars will be wanting, or we must be permitted to appropriate a part of the fifty thousand to a theatre, leaving the Rotunda unfinished for the present.  Yet I should think neither of these objects an equivalent for renewing the displeasure of the legislature.  Unless we can carry their hearty patronage with us, the institution can never flourish.  I would not, therefore, hint at this additional aid, unless it were agreeable to our friends generally, and tolerably sure of being carried without irritation.

In your letter of December the 31st, you say my ’hand-writing and my letters have great effect there,’ i.e. at Richmond.  I am sensible, my dear Sir, of the kindness with which this encouragement is held up to me.  But my views of their effect are very different.  When I retired from the administration of public affairs, I thought I saw some evidence that I retired with a good degree of public favor, and that my conduct in office had been considered, by the one party at least, with approbation, and with acquiescence by the other.  But the attempt, in which I have embarked so earnestly, to procure an improvement in the moral condition of my native State, although, perhaps, in other States it may have strengthened good dispositions, it has assuredly weakened them within our own.  The attempt ran foul of so many local interests, of so many personal views, and so much ignorance, and I have been considered as so particularly its promoter, that I see evidently a great change of sentiment towards myself.  I cannot doubt its having dissatisfied with myself a respectable minority, if not a majority of the House of Delegates.  I feel it deeply, and very discouragingly.  Yet I shall not give way.  I have ever found in my progress through life, that, acting for the public, if we do always what is right, the approbation denied in the beginning will surely follow us in the end.  It is from posterity