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Savage, blessed old man, is busy with his unending antiquarian researches, and makes his last days happy—though an excellent wife and two daughters have been taken from him—by bringing to his home a daughter, made to carry sunshine anywhere, and a son-in-law of much intellectual cultivation and very agreeable qualities.
We are worried about your war, and are probably more anxious to see an end of it than if we were Englishmen.
At least, such is the case with those of us who are most interested in the land of our forefathers. . . . .
My dear Kenyon, remember us, as we do you, with true regard, and write to us as soon as you can.
Yours faithfully always,
To Sir Edmund Head.
Boston, March 2, 1855.
My dear Head,—Thanks for your letter, with the references to Calderon and Romilly, and for the note with its enclosed pamphlet about the Bodleian.
The reference to Romilly came particularly apropos;1 for I have had two letters—the second a sort of postscript to the first from Lord Mahon about the Andre matter. . . . . Lord Mahon cited to me an opinion of Guizot's, given him lately in conversation at Paris, that Washington should not have permitted Andre to be hanged; to which I gave him your reference to Romilly, as a Roland for his Oliver.
He is in trouble, too, about a passage in his last volume concerning the Buff and Blue—‘Mrs. Crewe, true blue’—as the Fox colors, which he intimates, you know, to have been taken in compliment to Washington.
But, besides that,—as I think,—the Whigs would have been reproached for this assumption of traitor colors in a way that would not now be forgotten; these colors were fashionable earlier.
You will find a curious proof of this in Goethe's autobiography,--‘Dichtung und Wahrheit,’ Book XII:,—where, speaking of the young Jerusalem as the chief prototype of his Werther, he says that he wore a blue coat, and buff vest and underclothes, with top-boots; a dress, he adds, which had been already introduced into Lower Germany, in ‘Nachahmung der Englander.’
This was at Wetzlar, in Upper Germany, in 1772, where the fashion evidently attracted notice as a known English one.
Washington's cocked hat, and that of our army at the time, I have supposed, might have been taken from the hat of Frederick 