I trust that Your Excellency will do Me the justice to beleive that Your request with regard to the volumes of Lewis & Clarke would have been complied with long since & the books transmitted if the work had not been unexpectedly detained in the hands of the Printer They have now arrived at the conclusion of the work excepting the diary of the weather &c which comes in at the appendix. The delay has been occasioned by the press of other avocations which the Printers have been obliged to turn their more immediate attention to & particularly periodical works. My reason for troubling Your Excellency is an apprehension that You would deem Me neglectful of Your request of which [bele]ive Me Sir I am utterly incapable. With regard to the biographick [sketch] which You so condescendingly furnished Me with, I have to offer my sincerest thanks accompanied I must confess with some little chagrin that it was out of my power to requite the obligation. My mind was for sometime wavering on the propriety of annexing to Your biographick sketch a particular account of the melancholy death of Capt Lewis. That account has already been published by the late Alexander Wilson Esqr the celebrated ornithologist. But as this might notwithstanding in all human probability wound the sensibility of surviving relatives & freinds, I deemed it the most expedient to err on the side of humanity & rather to veil the severity of biographick fact than to have my motives misunderstood by the recital.—I should1 have been much gratified by annexing a sketch of the life of Gov. Clarke but that has been long since abandoned as unattainable. The misfortune in such cases is that with regard to many of the Men who have adorned the character of their Country it is by One single act that they have rendered themselves illustrious. When that act is told the whole of the Life of the Individual so far as the Publick is interested becomes already known & precludes interesting biography. Thus this hazardous expedition is the only part of Capt Lewis life which were he now alive he would be willing probably to Submit to publick Notice—it was on one occasion only that his great talents were put to the proof & then they were found adequate to the emergen[cy.]

It is commonly beleived by Mankind that when one [. . .] Beings displays talents commensurate with the occasion [. . .] them forth, the whole of his previous life must exhibit some traces of that character. This is a great mistake which may be illustrated by an anecdote of my Countryman the late Gen. Greene. When he was a Militia General in Rhode Island he addressed a petition2 to the Legislature of that State menti[o]ning that a bill of six shillings of Continental currency was accidentaly washed to peices in his Jacket pocket & praying compensation.3

Yet this was the same Nathaniel Greene who afterwards delivered the southern States from the tyranny of England!