Note 6 — PART V. THE ANAS.

[These are the volumes containing the celebrated Anas, up to the time of the author's retirement from the Secretaryship of State. Some of his friends have regretted that they were ever published. However that may be, they have been published, and it was manifestly the purpose of Mr. Jefferson that they should be. Late in life, "when the passions of the times had passed away," he carefully revised them for publication. "At this day," he says, "after the lapse of twenty-five years, or more, from their dates, I have given to the whole a calm revisal, when the passions of the times are passed away, and the reasons of the transactions act alone upon the judgment. Some of the informations I had recorded, are now cut out from the rest, because I have seen that they were incorrect, or doubtful, or merely personal or private, with which we have nothing to do. I should, perhaps, not have thought the rest worth preserving, but for their testimony against the only history of that period, which pretends to have been compiled from authentic and unpublished documents." Under these circumstances, the Editor has not felt himself at liberty to exclude the Anas from a publication professing to be a complete edition of the writings of Jefferson. They are accordingly inserted just in the form in which he left them after his last revisal.—Ed.]