Went to town this morning. Received a letter from Mr. Hallett1 by which he makes it a matter of personal favour to be released from the publication of my letter. He says that they are winding up the con-289cerns of the old establishment and trying to form out of it a new one. My inference is that Mr. Kendall is the person relied upon for the latter, and hence the difficulty in my proposition. Perhaps there are some few of the Antimasons who might be unsettled by it. However this may be, my position is by it made curious. I am asked to sink what I maintain to be the sacrifice of a great public principle, as a matter of favour to an individual. Is this tenable in morals? I think not.

My answer2 was that I was willing to release him from the publication of my letter, that I regretted the circumstances which made it impossible for him safely to consent to it, but that I could not argue from the same data, and therefore could not deviate3 with him so far as to suppress my sense of the act of Mr. Kendall. My request now was that he would explain away his praise of that letter, and I intimated that I held the correspondence ready for publication at a favorable opportunity. The remainder of my time in Boston passed at my house and in commissions.

Home. Afternoon, at my house where I was provoked by the dilatoriness of Mr. Ayer as usual and then home where I read a little of Lessing and Humboldt whose statistical account of Mexico is quite interesting. Evening at home.