The New Hampshire Gazette

A letter said to have been written by the President of the United States to the President and Secretaries of the National Institute of France, has appeared in some of the public prints. The original, written in English, appears to have been translated into French, and retranslated into English. We are enabled now to give a correct copy of the original.

Citizens President and Secretaries,

I HAVE received the letter wherein you have been pleased to announce to me that the National Institute of Sciences and Arts had elected me a foreign associate for the class of moral and political sciences; and I receive it with that sensibility which such an expression of respect from a body of the first order of science is calculated to inspire. Without pretensions to those qualifications which might do justice to the appointment, I accept it as an evidence of the brotherly spirit of science, which unites into one family all its votaries of whatever grade, and however widely dispersed through the different quarters of the globe.

Accept Citizens President and Secretaries, for yourselves and associates the assurance of my high consideration and respect.

TH: JEFFERSON.

Washington, November 14, 1802.

We feel a great deal of commiseration, in arresting, by the publication of a correct copy of Mr. Jefferson's letter to the National Institute, the labours of some of the most distinguished federal prints. With the patriotic vigilance that so honourably characterizes them, they have begun without mercy either for the President's character or the patience of their readers, to descant at great length on some peculiar expressions in the letter as taken from the English prints, not on account of the ideas it conveys, but solely on account of the words used. Unfortunately, however, for our learned philologits, the copy criticised is an awkward translation, and the original contains not one of the phrases carped at. What a vast fund of erudition will this unlucky disclosure lock up forever! But for it, we might have had essay upon essay, and wit as bright and exhaustless as that occasioned by the Mammoth cheese.