On 25 Mar. 1823 one of TJ’s granddaughters wrote from Monticello that “Mr. Dodge the consul at Marseilles has just been here on a visit to Grand-Papa, I did not return from Ashton until a day or two before he went away, but every one here was pleased with his frank manners and agreable conversation, and he certainly is very handsome and genteel” (Virginia J. Randolph [Trist] to Nicholas P. Trist, 25 Mar. 1823 [RC in DLC: NPT]). Three days later another of TJ’s granddaughters commented further on Dodge’s visit: “since the spring came on we have received one visit and made one very pleasant acquaintance, a certain Mr Dodge, in whom I could find no fault but his name. this gentleman, the American Consul at Marseilles & returned to his country after an absence of seven years, left Monticello, from the visit of a week, carrying with him the good will of the whole family, and their sincere regret that being but a bird of passage, and waiting only for the ‘warning voice’ of another autumn to wing his way to the bright skies of France, there is but little probability of our ever seeing him again—I was so unwell when he first arrived & indeed continued so during the whole time of his stay, that I could not derive from his acquaintance the pleasure it seemed to afford others, but the little I saw and heard, shewed him young, handsome, intelligent and well-bred, very much of a frenchman in his manners & so much so in his tongue, as not always to express himself elegantly in english, & now and then, not even grammatically, but then he apologized so genteely, & his french or italian words dropt so gracefully from between white teeth and rosy lips, that I dare say I should have thought him and them charming if ‘pleasures had not lost the power to please’ with me” (Ellen W. Randolph [Coolidge] to Nicholas P. Trist, 28 Mar. 1823 [RC in DLC: NPT]). The quotations in the second letter reference John Milton’s Paradise Lost, 4.1–2 (“O for that warning voice, which he who saw The Apocalypse heard cry in Heaven aloud”), and Thomas Campbell’s 1799 poem, The Pleasures of Hope, 2.225–6 (“Her musing mood shall every pang appease, And charm—when pleasures lose the power to please!”).