SI R ,—Dr. Coulton has misunderstood my letter; and I am very sorry he has made it the occasion for further abuse of Fr. Thurston.
I wonder if anyone else thought that my general reference to abusive letters and pamphlets which have caused Cardinal Gasquet and others to prefer not to have dealings with him, could be read as a specific allusion to the preliminary correspondence addressed to Cardinal Gasquet in 1901?
The point which Fr. Thurston stresses with regard to those three letters of 1901 is that the writer was unknown to the Cardinal and had as yet not published any historical work. It is not surprising that Abbot Gasquet did not reply to the first of these. However, he acknowledged the second and third, the one on an occasion when he was evidently in poor health, the other when he was very busy. It seems good of him to have taken any notice of Dr. Couiton's " probing questions " at all.
There is no doubt about the abusiveness of the letter of May 29, 1905, in which Dr. Coulton accused the Abbot of mistranslating the plain Latin of his
CantinutY1 at font of n,rt rob! .