I beg you would not trouble yourself with any answer to this. The knowledge of your good opinion and good wishes, is quite sufficient for me. I feel for the difficulties of your situation, but your spirit and prudence will carry you thro them, tho not without paying the tax which the wise laws of nature have imposed upon preeminence and celebrity of every kind, a tax which, for want of true greatness of mind, neither of your predecessors, if I estimate their characters aright, paid without much reluctance.
With every good wish, I am,
Dear Sir,
Yours sincerely,
J. PRIESTLEY.
P.S.
As I trust that Politics will not make you forget what is due to science, I shall send you a copy of some articles that are just printed for the Transactions of the Philosophical Society in this place. No. (5) p. 36 is the most deserving of your notice. I should have sent you my Defence of Phlogiston, but that I presume you have seen it.
June, 1802.
To Thomas Jefferson, President of the United States of America.
Sir,
My high respect for your character, as a politician, and a man, makes me desirous of connecting my name, in some measure with yours while it is in my power, by means of some publication, to do it.
The first part of this work, which brought the history to the fall of the western empire, was dedicated to a zealous friend of civil and religious liberty, but in a private station. What he, or any other friend of liberty in Europe, could only do by their good wishes, by writing, or by patriot suffering, you, Sir, are actually accomplishing, and upon a theatre of great and growing extent.