families had moved into Albemarle. His neighbors were all men like his father; and his father led, not by virtue of a social tradition, but by the unaided force of character and intellect, by a big heart and a big brain. Peter was a Democrat and Thomas was born into Democracy. Presently he found that this gymnasium had given him its best and he left it for Williamsburg; for the college and his beloved professor, Dr. Small, learned and liberal and cultured and wise, for the Governor's palace and the society of the brilliant, witty, generous, sceptical Fauquier; for the houses of his kinsfolk, on the spindle side, great tobacco lords, horsemen, fox-hunters, orators, politicians, dandies, debauchees, belles and flirts. All taught him something; with a quite beautiful loyalty and lovingness he writes many years afterwards that it was Dr. Small who "probably fixed the destinies of my life." Even Rebecca Burwell had her little lesson for him. But after all these lessons he turned back and said that the earliest lesson was the best. He tells us that he set himself down deliberately to ask, Which shall it be Horseman? fox-hunter? orator or to use his own noble phrase:

"Honest advocate of my country's rights"?

The answer was never doubtful; old Peter's blood, old Peter's training, old Peter's tradition was too strong, and Thomas Jefferson sits among the immortals because he made himself just that-an honest advocate of his country's rights.

Once more, Thomas Jefferson, college graduate, had in his hands the keys at least to all the learning of his time. He had come to William and Mary from the hands of Maury, well grounded in Greek and Latin; and at the college he had built on this foundation so well that these early friends to the life of the spirit never forsook him. He read Latin and he read Greek freely and fluently down to his very last year; not in the prideful pose of a devotee of culture; not with the meticulous care of the modern philologian; but out of his love for the beauty expressed by those old masters in the realm of thought and for the comfort of their wisdom and for the uplift of their lifty spirits. He fell into a blunder now and then, but he read on and loved them still. He added to this while at the college

an effectual reading-knowledge of French, developed later during his Parisian residence into a speaking knowledge of the same tongue; and by private study in after life he gained a certain mastery of Italian and Spanish and a trifle of German. Under the powerful stimulus of Dr. Small's genius he learned to love mathematics and the natural sciences, although the practical bent of his own nature led him invariably to their applied forms; and it may have been from the same source that he received that impulse to the architectural studies which have left on American state and tradition a stamp so beautiful and clear and ineffaceable. If we may trust his own auto-psychology, music and mathematics and architecture became at this time the "passion of his soul." If I may trust my own reading of his story, I should say that politics was his legal wife; law her trustful handmaid; and music, mathematics and architecture three beautiful Geisha girls, kept for the solace of his leisure hours. Better than all this for him was it that he learned from scientific Small the true method of the scholar and so learned it that he applied this method to all the future problems of life. One example out of many must suffice. In his early studies of the law he found it laid down as the doctrine of the courts that "Christianity is parcel of the laws of England." This our young student, knowing the historic evolution of the Common Law, could not believe. He pushed his studies back, back through Coke-upon-Lyttleton, back through Henry Brackton, back to the laws of Alfred the Great. He discovered the source of the suspected error in a mis-translation of Prisot, where ancient scripture is rendered Holy Scriptures. He proved that ancient scripture meant just what it appears to mean, the old records of the courts and nothing more. At once and forever our young Virginian exploded a legal fallacy supported by such great authorities as Sir Matthew Hale, Sir William Blackstone and Lord Mansfield. Long years before the modern slang about "die Quellen" was ever heard, Thomas Jefferson had traced the way of the scholar back to the ultimate sources of scholarship.

If, then, we ask ourselves, Who was Thomas Jefferson? we must say that he was a young Virginian in whose veins ran the united streams of the blood of the democrat and the blood of the aristocrat, no longer discordant, but beating in one deep,

harmonious, sympathetic pulse; in whose training the noblest influences of the rural life and the urban life had worked together to produce a vigorous and healthy body, a clear and disciplined mind, a sweet and unspoiled heart; for whose instruction the stores of ancient learning and of modern science had been both unlocked to a native genius which found in them its fit and proper food, and built out of them some of the great landmarks of our American civilization. Such was Jefferson the youth; what of Jefferson the man?

LAWYER JEFFERSON.

We left our young Jefferson homeward bound with Cokeupon-Lyttleton in his trunk. Youth of the present day with one-tenth of his training and one-thousandth of his genius give two or at most three years to the study of the law. His friend Patrick Henry with no training and divine genius gave it six weeks. Jefferson, working under the personal tuition of a great jurist and matchless teacher, gave it five years. In these years he covered, however, a vast range of collateral knowledge, dug his way back into the very foundations of the Common Law, and made himself familiar with the Statute Law of England, and of Virginia. He was not admitted to the Bar until April, 1767, but then soon took rank with the most erudite and the most successful lawyers of the Colony. His clients were numerous and many of them wealthy and of the highest social rank. His professional income was for that age a large one, averaging for the seven years of his active practice (1767-1775) three thousand dollars a year. Out of the profits of his office he increased his patrimonial estate from 1,900 to 5,000 acres, supported the large family of his widowed mother, provided for the marriages of his sisters, Martha and Lucy, and made some headway on the creation of that home upon the summit of Monticello, whose appealing loveliness seems still to whisper the secrets of the master's deepest soul.

The active days and busy nights of this successful lawyer were not given wholly to money getting. The abstruser studies of legal science still claimed their share of his love and devotion. The early Virginia statutes existed in manuscript only. No files had been preserved in the government archives. We are in debt to Jefferson for the rescue of these precious documents of our

earliest history and laws. Some of the copies recovered by him were unique; some rotten and obscure from age; some actually perished in the exposure necessary for the transcription. If posterity owes to Jefferson its undying thanks for these patriotic labors, Jefferson himself drew from them that peculiar and intimate knowledge of the political institutions developed through the long struggle for freedom in England and transplanted by Englishmen to the shores of the new world, which made him in the troubled years approaching the greatest and most powerful advocate of his country's rights.

The ten years of this period developed Jefferson in other aspects of his rich and complex nature. The purest and sweetest friendship of a life singularly rich in genuine friendships shed its perfume over them. Dabney Carr, his boyhood's mate, his sister Martha's husband from 1765 to 1775, growing day by day into a companionship and love closer than brotherhood itself, was torn away by death while the eloquent echoes of Carr's maiden speech still floated on the Virginian air. Jefferson at once took charge of Carr's widow, supported and educated and launched in life all his six children, loving his sister more tenderly for her sorrow and Carr's offspring as his own. The ashes of the two friends today mingle beneath the oaks of Monticello.

If there be an earthly relationship between man and woman, which has in it somewhat of angelical sanctity and sweetness, it is that between a loving sister and a devoted and high-minded brother. Free from a fetter of dependence, passionless and pure and holy, alike intimate and affectionate, compact of loyalty and sacred faith, it rings sound and true in every earthly trial as in every earthly joy. It alone of all human loves may dare to pass unpurged and unchallenged beyond the gate of paradise. Such a sister was Jane Jefferson, such a brother was Thomas. His peer in intellect, his rival only in their mutual devotion, the confident of all his earthly ambitions and his early loves, warm with the fervor of deep religious feeling, gifted with a voice of rare sweetness and exquisite skill, she lives for us in the tradition of their music, when her harpsichord and Jefferson's violin accompanied their youthful voices in tender ballad or in sacred chant. This tie, too, death was to sever; the autumn leaves of 1765 hid

with their golden glories the sister's new-made grave. Jefferson never forgot her; even in his old age the chanted liturgy of the church would bring back to him that sacred and beloved image, and he would tell over to his grand-daughters the story of her tenderness and her truth.

One other link in the chain of life was forged for Jefferson in these same days. Those first love passages with Rebecca Burwell now sounded through his dreams like far distant echoes of an earlier life. The sprightly Rebecca had with delicious promptitude thrown Thomas over, and given herself to his hated rival, when Thomas proposed to hang her up to dry, while he went a-touring for three years across the ocean. But this was ages ago, as lovers count time, seven long years, and Thomas now began to sit up and take notice. This time 'twas not a maid, but a widow; not Rebecca, but Martha. What fine, good-sounding names men's sweethearts had in those distant days! But the gentle hand of the widow has not lost its cunning, whether her name be Mary, or Martha, or Gladys, or Gwendolen, and that hand will always be skillful in the nursing back to life of lovelorn swains. The time we are studying might indeed be fairly called the Widow's Age. Washington married the widow Curtis ; Jefferson married the widow Skelton; Madison married the widow Todd; Hamilton married a charming spinster, but (if we may trust tradition) loved widows in the plural. The catalogue of charming widows and illustrous lovers would be a long one. Jefferson's widow was musical, beautiful, twenty-two, and an heiress. They were married on the New Year's day of 1772, journeyed homeward in a phaeton, were caught in a blinding snowstorm, mounted on their horses backs and plodded up through three feet of snow to the top of Monticello. It was after midnight when they reached their dwelling place and the servants despairing of their coming had gone to bed. But love, candles, a big fireplace soon filled with blazing hickory logs, a bottle of wine, a loaf of bread, laughter and song made it a happy homecoming, and for ten years this beautiful and gracious woman filled Jefferson's life with such happiness as only perfect love and unalloyed tenderness can give to man. The love-light kindled that night upon his hearthstone never grew dim. On his wife's