Justice, there is no record of Mr. Burke having been made acquainted with the masterly performance of his fellowlabourer. He who opened his arms to the able and brilliant, but very inferior coadjutor, whom he found in Professor Wylde, must have received with delight such an ally as the author of this admirable book. It clearly contains not merely the germ and rudiments of the extraordinary, and in some sort peculiar, eloquence for which its author was afterwards so remarkable, but, with a few occasional exceptions in point of severity, a few deviations from simplicity, pardonable on such a subject, it exhibits that very diction itself which distinguished him-chaste and pure, addressed continually to the subject in hand, instinct with epigram, sufficiently but soberly sprinkled with flowers, often sharpened with sarcasm, always akin to serious and wise reflection. When we reflect that this was the work of a very young man, the maturity and gravity of the style, as well as the reasoning, becomes exceedingly striking; and it is interesting to observe the impression which a perusal of it left on its author's mind after an interval of many years. He possibly felt some of that mortification which Sir Joshua Reynolds and other great artists are known to have expressed upon remarking the excellence of their earlier efforts, and being sensible how little their pencil had afterwards improved. Be that as it may, the fol lowing note lies before me in the Chief Justice's hand, dated August, 1831, and it may appropriately close these commentaries.

"I have read over," says his Lordship, "a pamphlet which I wrote in 1791, when a very young man, in my twenty-fifth year; and although my better, at least older, judgment and taste condemn some instances of hasty and erroneous opinions rashly hazarded, much superficial and inaccurate reasoning, and several puerilities and affectations of style, yet at the end of forty years, I abide by most of the principles which I then maintained, and consider the execution of the work, taken altogether, as better than any thing of which I am now capable."

What shall be said of the careful attention to this subject of writers who make Lord Grenville's government be dismissed in 1803, and Mr. Bushe have then been thirteen years at the bar; and who represent Mr. Sheridan as taking a part against the Coercion Bill in 1817 when he died in 1816, and had not been in Parliament since 1812 ?

THOMAS JEFFERSON.

WE have had occasion to note the extraordinary capacity and brilliant history of Washington and Franklin, next to whom undoubtedly among the great men that founded the American republic is to be mentioned Jefferson, although he follows them at a considerable distance. But without the extraordinary virtue of the one-because, indeed, he never passed through the same temptation, and without the singular genius of the other, his services to the great cause of human liberty were truly valuable; his life was steadily devoted to the maintenance of his principles; and he displayed both firmness and ability in the important scenes in which he performed a conspicuous part. At a time when there is an unaccountable disposition, even among the friends of liberty, to undervalue the institutions of the Great Republic, to grudge her extraordinary success, and to take delight in foretelling her dismemberment and her downfall, it becomes a duty to commemorate the virtues of her founders, even if we should not in all particulars adopt their political opinions, and if we should witness with pain some glaring imperfections in the frame or in the working of the polity which they established.

He was educated very carefully for the profession of the law, and had also the inestimable advantage of good classical and scientific instruction. He studied the mathematics under Dr. Small, a brother of the mathematician of that name, who acquired great fame among geometricians by his demonstrations of Dr. Matthew Stewart's celebrated Porisms. When Jefferson came to Virginia, his native state, he was soon distinguished among his brethren as a sound and accurate lawyer. His speaking was plain and business-like, aspiring to no higher praise. But during the eight years that he continued in the profession his success was so great that he must have risen to the foremost, rank as a practitioner. It happened, however, that the disputes between the mother country and the colonies now broke out, and being chosen in his twenty-fifth year to represent his county in the Virginian Assembly, he soon withdrew his attention from legal pursuits, and finally abandoned them

altogether, when he led the way to the Revolution by his Resolution which the Assembly adopted to establish a Committee of Correspondence with the legislatures of the other colonies. The Convention, and then the General Congress, soon followed; indeed, they grew naturally out of the Committee, and only waited the next act of oppression from England to mature them. Yet still there was the most marked reluctance to throw off the yoke of the mother country. Jefferson himself, in a letter to the AttorneyGeneral, Randolph, written so late as the middle of 1775, and after the first blood that stained the unhappy quarrel had been shed, declared that "in the whole empire there was not a man who more cordially loved the union with Great Britain;" but he added his fixed resolution not to. bear taxation without representation.* Even after the battle of Bunker's Hill he expressed to his old master, Dr. Small, then settled in Scotland, his anxious hopes of conciliation. The party called moderate, in contradistinction to the Washingtons and Jeffersons, that under Dickenson, were not less prepared for desperate extremities, if the cardinal point of taxation should not be conceded by England. It is certain, and it is the greatest praise which can be bestowed upon any people in such circumstances, that all parties were guided by men who united extraordinary firmness with singular moderation-men, above all, whose singleness of purpose never appears in any instance to have been suspected.

But if, in contemplating their whole conduct in the different courses which they had to steer, we look in vain for any deviation from the line of principle and integrity, we also find it impossible to discover any material error of judgment committed in the whole management of their perilous and perplexing affairs. From all the unreflecting violence, the sudden changes, the intemperate excesses, the thoughtless desertion of leaders, the alternations of popular admiration and hatred, by which other revolutions have been so constantly distinguished, when the people were the principal agents in bringing them about, it must be confess

*The thoughtless fully of some in the United States and some in France likening the case of the Union with Ireland to the subordination of America, exceeds belief. Who in America would ever have rebelled, nay, who would ever have agitated, if the Americans had been represented in our Parliament?

ed with wonder that the conduct of the Americans was wholly exempt. No deliberative assembly of men, small in number and acting free from all popular instigation or control, ever carried on the affairs of a community settled in peace and whose existence was assured, with greater calmness or more steady judgment than the American Congress showed in guiding a revolutionary movement, involving at each step of its progress their own existence and that of the community whom they represented and governed.

When it seemed manifest that neither side would yield and a separation became inevitable, a committee of five, at the head of whom was Jefferson, received the commission to prepare a manifesto of their reasons for at length taking the great step. His colleagues were Franklin, Adams, Sherman, and Livingston; the paper was prepared by him; they made few alterations, but the Congress omitted about a third part of it, in order to avoid topics that might give offence in the mother country. Among these omissions was a paragraph reprobating the African slave-trade, to which they might not unjustly suppose England was partial, inas. much as she had formerly interposed her authority-shamefully, scandalously, wickedly interposed it-to prevent the abolition earnestly desired by her colonial subjects. Nevertheless, it is possible that the omission was also made with a view to conciliate the slave-holding states who had not yet resolved to set their faces against this great abomination. With these omissions and the further alteration of a few lines, the instrument was finally adopted, and it was signed on the Fourth of July.

This is that famous Declaration of Independence by which the freemen of the New World approved themselves worthy of their ancestors in the Old those ancestors who had spoken, and written, and fought, and perished for conscience and for freedom's sake, but whose descendants in the Old had not always borne their high lineage in mind. In the history of mankind there is no more important event, on which side soever of the Atlantic its consequences may be regarded; and if tyrants are sometimes said to feel uneasy on the Thirtieth of January, how much more fitted to inspire alarm are the recollections associated with the Fourth of July, in which no remorse can mingle on the people's part, and no consolation is afforded to their oppressors by

the tendency of cruelty and injustice to mar the work they stain !

I have noted the unfortunate omission of the paragraph relating to the Slave Trade; and it is only just to Jefferson's memory that it should here be inserted. The frame of the Declaration was to charge all the grievances complained of directly upon the King of England.

"He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people, who never offended him, captivating* and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to more miserable death in their transportation thither. The piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian king of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where men should be bought and sold, he has prostituted his prerogative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce. And, that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished dye, he is now exciting these very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people on whom he also has obtruded them; thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another."

It is to the unspeakable honour of Jefferson, that, born and bred in Virginia, himself an owner of negroes like all Virginian landholders, his first motion in the Assembly was a proposition to facilitate the manumission of slaves. It was not till 1782 that the full power of emancipation was given by the legislature. But his proposal in 1779 was still further in advance of his age; it was to declare all children of slaves, born after a certain day, free, and to carry them at a certain age as colonists of a new territory, the only practical scheme, perhaps, by which the foul blot of slavery can be removed from the United States.

His plan for the planting of elementary schools to educate the whole people, and of establishing colleges for the middle classes, and an university for the higher branches of learning, was fated to experience similar delays, though happily

* As usual this will be reckoned an Americanism (as the Greeks used to say of their colonists a Solæcism). But it has undoubted English authority-Locke among others.