Life of Count Rumford. 207 



correspondence with military men and royalists on this 

 side of the water, must certainly have kept his rela- 

 tives and old neighbors perfectly informed about himself. 

 How far. and in what way he may have kept himself ac- 

 quainted, by exchange of messages or letters, with those 

 naturally most dear to him, and with their fortunes 

 during the war, there is now extant no sufficient means 

 for deciding. Communications of that kind were diffi- 

 cult and embarrassing. Perhaps the severance of his 

 domestic and civil ties was attended for a short time 

 with soreness of feeling and apparent alienation. The 

 embitterment of the strife as the war advanced, caused 

 by the prostration of this country, the havoc and ruin 

 which were so wide-spread, the contemptuous spirit and 

 the ruthless animosity which dictated the successive 

 hostile measures of Great Britain, and the employment 

 of foreign mercenaries against us, made the progress of 

 the conflict more and more effective in destroying or in 

 impeding the expression of anything like kindly senti- 

 ments between the parties. 



I have deferred the introduction of the following let- 

 ter which, as its date will show, was written between 

 two and three years before the Count left Munich for 

 his visit to England because it seems to be in itself but 

 a fragment of a correspondence which was apparently 

 resumed by Colonel Baldwin shortly before. This 

 reply, as well as the reference made in it to the letter 

 that called it forth, would lead us to infer that it was 

 a resumption of the friendly intercourse between the 

 parties, which, beginning in childhood, was interrupted 

 by the exile of Thompson. From some memoranda of 

 Colonel Baldwin's I infer, also, that his friend had 

 made pecuniary remittances to his mother and daughter 



