Gazette Of The United States

FROM THE AMERICAN DAILY ADVERTISER.

Mr. Dunlap,

As Corner Stones to public buildings are merely intended for the information of posterity, when their ruins may be searched, to trace their antiquity, nothing should be handed down by the press, which, professing to be authentic, is an incorrect relation of a fact. Your paper of this morning, contains, as a reader would be apt to suppose, a copy of the inscription on the corner stone of the President's house, taken by a person who had seen it.

I will take the liberty of presenting you with a true copy, taken from the stone as it lay in the stone cutter's shop. That the inscription you have been pleased to give is not superior to that on the stone, I will not assert; but as old Hearne, the antiquarian, would have deemed it an unpardonable deviation, if chance had presented to his view an antique falsely described by a writer cotemporary with the artist, I would gladly screen you from the Hearnes of future days. The true inscription is as follows: "This Corner Stone, of the House to accommodate the President of the United States, was laid, May 10, 1792: when Pennsylvania was happily out of debt; Thomas Mifflin then Governor of the State."