sible; and when leisure has been won, most of the class possessing it will waste it in the pursuit of pleasure, and a few will employ it in the pursuit of knowledge." Men like Jefferson, George Wythe, and Madison used their leisure for the good of their fellowbeings and for the cultivation of their minds; whereas the greater part of the planters and the poor whites imitated them spent their ample leisure in sports, in drinking, and in absolute idleness. "In spite of the Virginians' love for dissipation," wrote a famous French traveler, "the taste for reading is commoner among men of the first rank than in any other part of America; but the populace is perhaps more ignorant there than elsewhere." “The Virginia virtues," says Mr. Henry Adams, "were those of the field and farm the simple and straightforward mind, the notions of courage and truth, the absence of mercantile sharpness and quickness, the rusticity and open-handed hospitality." Virginians of the upper class were remarkable for their high-bred courtesy, -a trait so inherent that it rarely disappeared

even in the bitterness of political disputes and divisions. This, too, was the natural product of a society based not on trade or commerce, but on land. "I blush for my own people," wrote Dr. Channing, from Virginia, in 1791, "when I compare the selfish prudence of a Yankee with the generous confidence of a Virginian. Here I find great vices, but greater virtues than I left behind

me.

There was a largeness of temper and of feeling in the Virginia aristocracy, which seems to be inseparable from people living in a new country, upon the outskirts of civilization. They had the pride of birth, but they recognized other claims to consideration, and were as far as possible from estimating a man according to the amount of his wealth.

Slavery itself was probably a factor for good in the character of such a man as Jefferson, it afforded a daily exercise in the virtues of benevolence and self-control. How he treated the blacks may be gathered from a story, told by his superintendent, of a slave named Jim who had been caught stealing

nails from the nail-factory: "When Mr. Jefferson came, I sent for Jim, and I never saw any person, white or black, feel as badly as he did when he saw his master. The tears streamed down his face, and he begged for pardon over and over again. I felt very badly myself. Mr. Jefferson turned to me and said, Ah, sir, we can't punish him. He has suffered enough already.' He then talked to him, gave him a heap of good advice, and sent him to the shop. Jim said: Well I'se been a-seeking religion a long time, but I never heard anything before that sounded so, or made me feel so, as I did when Master said, "Go, and don't do so any more," and now I'se determined to seek religion till I find it;' and sure enough he afterwards came to me for a permit to go and be baptized. He was always a good servant afterward."

Another element that contributed to the efficiency and the high standard of the early Virginia statesman was a good, old-fashioned classical education. They were familiar, to use Matthew Arnold's famous expression,

"with the best that has ever been said or done." This was no small advantage to men who were called upon to act as founders of a republic different indeed from the republics of Greece and Rome, but still based upon the same principles, and demanding an exercise of the same heroic virtues. The American Revolution would never have cut quite the figure in the world which history assigns to it, had it not been conducted with a kind of classic dignity and decency; and to this result nobody contributed more than Jefferson.

Such was Virginia in the eighteenth century, at the base of society, the slaves; next, a lower class, rough, ignorant, and somewhat brutal, but still wholesome, and possessing the primitive virtues of courage and truth; and at the top, the landed gentry, luxurious, proud, idle and dissipated for the most part, and yet blossoming into a few characters of a type so high that the world has hardly seen a better. Had he been born in Europe, Jefferson would doubtless have devoted himself to music, or to

architecture, or to literature, or to science, for in all these directions his taste was nearly equally strong; but these careers being closed to him by the circumstances of the colony, he became a lawyer, and then, under pressure of the Revolution, a politician and statesman.

During the four years following his graduation, Jefferson spent most of the winter months at Williamsburg, pursuing his legal and other studies, and the rest of the year upon the family plantation, the management of which had devolved upon him. Now, as always, he was the most industrious of men. He lived, as Mr. Parton remarks, "with a pen in his hand." He kept a garden book, a farm book, a weather book, a receipt book, a cash book, and, while he practiced law, a fee book. Many of these books are still preserved, and the entries are as legible now as when they were first written down in Jefferson's small but clear and graceful hand, the hand of an artist. Jefferson, as one of his old friends once remarked, hated superficial knowledge; and he dug to the roots of