the common law, reading deeply in old reports written in law French and law Latin, and especially studying Magna Charta and Bracton.

He found time also for riding, for music, and dancing; and in his twentieth year he became enamored of Miss Rebecca Burwell, a Williamsburg belle more distinguished, tradition reports, for beauty than for cleverness. But Jefferson was not yet in a position to marry, he even contemplated a foreign tour; and the girl, somewhat abruptly, married another lover. The wound seems not to have been a deep one. Jefferson, in fact, though he found his chief happiness in family affection, and though capable of strong and lasting attachments, was not the man for a romantic passion. He was a philosopher of the reasonable, eighteenthcentury type. No one was more kind and just in the treatment of his slaves, but he did not free them, as George Wythe, perhaps foolishly, did; and he was even cautious about promulgating his views as to the folly and wickedness of slavery, though he did his

best to promote its abolition by legislative measures. There was not in Jefferson the material for a martyr or a Don Quixote ; but that was Nature's fault, not his. It may be said of every particular man that there is a certain depth to which he cannot sink, and there is a certain height to which he cannot rise. Within the intermediate zone there is ample exercise for free-will; and no man struggled harder than Jefferson to fulfill all the obligations which, as he conceived, were laid upon him.

III

MONTICELLO AND ITS HOUSEHOLD

IN April, 1764, Jefferson came of age, and his first public act was a characteristic one. For the benefit of the neighborhood, he procured the passage of a statute to authorize the dredging of the Rivanna River upon which his own estate bordered in part. He then by private subscriptions raised a sum sufficient for carrying out this purpose; and in a short time the stream, upon which before a bark canoe would hardly have floated, was made available for the transportation of farm produce to the James River, and thence to the sea.

In 1766, he made a journey to Philadel phia, in order to be inoculated for smallpox, traveling in a light gig drawn by a highspirited horse, and narrowly escaping death by drowning in one of the numerous rivers which had to be forded between Charlottes

ville and Philadelphia. In the following year, about the time of his twenty-fourth birthday, he was admitted to the bar, and entered almost immediately upon a large and lucrative practice. He remained at the bar only seven years, but during most of this time his professional income averaged more than £2500 a year; and he increased his paternal estate from 1900 acres to 5000 acres. He argued with force and fluency, but his voice was not suitable for public speaking, and soon became husky. Moreover, Jefferson had an intense repugnance to the arena. He shrank with a kind of nervous horror from a personal contest, and hated to be drawn into a discussion. turmoil and confusion of a public body were hideous to him; it was as a writer, not as a speaker, that he won fame, first in the Virginia Assembly, and afterward in the Continental Congress.

The

In October, 1768, Jefferson was chosen to represent Albemarle County in the House of Burgesses of Virginia; and thus began his long political career of forty years.

A

resolution which he formed at the outset is stated in the following letter written in 1792 to a friend who had offered him a share in an undertaking which promised to be profitable:

"When I first entered on the stage of public life (now twenty-four years ago) I came to a resolution never to engage, while in public office, in any kind of enterprise for the improvement of my fortune, nor to wear any other character than that of a farmer. I have never departed from it in a single instance; and I have in multiplied instances found myself happy in being able to decide and to act as a public servant, clear of all interest, in the multiform questions that have arisen, wherein I have seen others embarrassed and biased by having got themselves in a more interested situation."

During the next few years there was a lull in political affairs, a sullen calm before the storm of the Revolution; but they were important years in Mr. Jefferson's life. In February, 1770, the house at Shadwell, where he lived with his mother and sisters,