I thank you very sincerely, Sir, for the kind expressions contained in your Letter of 1t instant, recd today.—The favorable terms you were pleased to use towards me, in a Letter you did me the honor to address to me in 1815, approving the humble Official Agency, I had exercised under you, and by your appointment, together with the urbane and polite treatment I had always received from you, would have induced me, if need had required it, to have asked of you a plain testimonial of your Opinion of my Charecter, which, if it had been fair & favorable, I should have deemed the highest evidence, as far as it might go, that any man could obtain; but I could not have expected you to have said more than that, in substance, I had a reputable standing or unimpeached charecter. I state this, Sir, truly, and beg you to believe that the impropriety which I now see1 I was led into (from the assurances or impressions of others) in expecting that you Could say any thing to a Foreign Prince or Government in favor of a young man, whom you never saw, did not originate in my own mind—All I ought to have done was to have mentioned my Sons wishes, and ye encouragement he had received, to enter the Russian service, at his own expense, to obtain a military education; and that, if you, Sir, thought it a commendable enterprize, as some less distinguished men do, and if it had not been disagreeable to you, to have said, in a few lines to myself, or any other person here, that you had heard of the young mans views, and that, knowing his father (as far as2 you might have been pleased to say) you wished the Son well, I should duly appreciate the favor to me, and the advantage of it to my Son—This I regret I did not confine myself to, but trust your goodness will pardon my departure from “the limits of propriety” in not doing so.