THOMAS JEFFERSON. JAS JEEELS, thud pestle at of the United States, cilo, in the rank copay, 4 Jalv, 1826, His father was her left 1 'm, he youll choose fre tlication HS schoolnites report d that at school he was 1 too for good scho.. ship, industry, an i די With... tay ་ འ”། ། His father's lang at the game I's father in his last hours and sto tady dorged his mother not to permit him to neglect the exercise requisite for health and strength; but the admonition was scarcely necessary, for the youth was a keen hunter and had been taught by his father to swim his horse over the Rivanna, a tributary of the James, which flowed by the estate. The Jeffersons were a musical family; the girls sang the songs of the time, and Thomas, practising the violin assiduously from boyhood, became an excellent performer. At seventeen, when he entered the College of William and Mary, he was tall, raw-boned, freckled, and sandyhaired, with large feet and hands, thick wrists, and prominent cheek-bones and chin. His comrades described him as far from handsome, a fresh, healthy-looking youth, very erect, agile, and strong, with something of rusticity in his air and demeanor. The college was not then efficient nor well equipped, but there was one true educator connected with it, Dr. William Small, of Scotland, professor of mathematics. Jefferson gratefully remembered him as an ardent student of science, who possessed a happy talent for communicating knowledge, a man of agreeable manners and enlightened mind. He goes so far as to say in his autobiography that his coming under the influence of Dr. Small "probably fixed the destinies of my life." The learned and genial professor became attached to his receptive pupil, made him the daily companion of his walks, and gave him those views of the connection of the sciences and of the system of things of which man is a part which then prevailed in the advanced scientific circles of Europe. Prof. Small was a friend of the poet Erasmus Darwin, progenitor of an illustrious line of learned men. Jefferson was a hard student in college, and at times forgot his father's dying injunction as to exercise. He kept horses at Williamsburg, but as his love of knowledge increased his rides became shorter and less frequent, and even his beloved violin was neglected. There was a time, as he remembered, when he studied fifteen hours a day. Once a week the lieutenant-governor, Francis Fauquier, had a musical party at the "palace," to which the guests, in the good old style of that century, brought their instruments. Jefferson was always present at these parties with his violin, and participated in the concert, the governor himself being also a performer. From Fauquier, a man of the world of the period, he learned much of the social, political, and parliamentary life of the Old World. George Wythe, afterward chancellor, was then a young lawyer of Williamsburg. He was one of the highly gifted men that frequented the governor's table, and contributed essentially to the forming of Jefferson's mind. On his graduation, Jefferson entered upon the study of law, under the guidance of George Wythe. As his father's estate was charged with the maintenance of a large family, a profession was necessary to the student, and he entered upon his preparation for the bar with all his energy and resolution. On coming of age, in April, 1764, he assumed the management of the estate, and was appointed to two of his father's offices— justice of the peace and vestryman. He gave much attention to the cultivation of his lands, and remained always an attentive, zealous, and improving farmer. He attached importance all his life to the fact that his legal training was based upon the works of Lord Coke, of whom he said that "a sounder Whig never wrote, nor one of profounder learning in the orthodox doctrines of the British constitution, or in what were called British liberties." It was his settled conviction that the early drill of the colonial lawyers in "Coke upon Lyttleton prepared them for the part they took in resisting the unconstitutional acts of the British government. Lawyers formed by Coke, he would say, were all good Whigs; but from the time that Blackstone became the leading text-book "the profession began to slide into Toryism." His own study of Coke led him to extend his researches into the origins of British law, and led him also to the rejection of the maxim of Sir Matthew Hale, that Christianity is parcel of the laws of England. His youthful treatise on this complex and difficult point shows us at once the minuteness and the extent of his legal studies. While he was a student of law, he was an eye-witness of those memorable scenes in the Virginia legislature which followed the passage of the stamp-act. He was present as a spectator in the house when Patrick Henry read his five resolutions, written upon a blank leaf torn from a "Coke upon Lyttleton," enunciating the principle that Englishmen living in America had all the rights of Englishmen living in England, the chief of which was, that they could only be taxed by their own representatives. When he was an old man, seated at his table at Monticello, he loved to speak of that great day, and to describe the thrill and ecstasy of the moment when the wonderful |