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in these dark and difficult days of the embargo policy, for which he has been so often and so unjustly assailed.

Though the last year of his administration was crowded by misfortunes, Jefferson's supremacy was unaffected. He received letters from the legislatures of Pennsylvania, Vermont, New Jersey, Maryland, and Georgia, and the Senate of New York, and from the House of Delegates of Virginia begging him to serve a third term; and his friends were convinced that, had his principles permitted, he would have been secure of re-election. One address, which was presented to him on the sixth of February by the Legislature of Virginia, and was said to have been drafted by William Wirt, afterwards Attorney General in Monroe's Administration, must have given the President peculiar satisfaction; and with its recital of Jefferson's services this chapter may fitly conclude:

"The General Assembly of your native state cannot close their session without acknowledging your services in the office which you are just about to lay down, and bidding you a respectful and affectionate farewell.

"We have to thank you for the model of an administration conducted on the purest principles of republicanism; for pomp and state laid aside; patronage discarded; internal taxes abolished; a host of superfluous officers disbanded; the monarchic maxim that ‘a national debt is a national blessing,' renounced, and more than thirty-three millions of our debt discharged; the native right to near one hundred millions of acres of our national domain extinguished; and without the guilt or calamities of conquest, a vast and fertile region added to our country, far more extensive than her original possessions, bringing along with it the Mississippi and the port of Orleans, the trade of the West to the Pacific Ocean, and in the intrinsic value of the land itself, a source of permanent and almost inexhaustible revenue. These are points in your administration which the historian will not fail to seize, to expand, and to teach posterity to dwell upon with delight. Nor will he forget

our peace with the civilized world, preserved through a season of uncommon difficulty and trial; the good will cultivated with the unfortunate aborigines of our country, and the civilization humanely extended among them; the lesson taught the inhabitants of the coast of Barbary, that we have the means of chastising their piratical encroachments, and awing them into justice; and that theme, which, above all others, the historic genius will hang upon with rapture, the liberty of speech and the press preserved inviolate, without which genius and science are given to man in vain.

"In the principles on which you have administered the government, we see only the continuation and maturity of the same virtues and abilities which drew upon you in your youth the resentment of Dunmore. From the first brilliant and happy moment of your resistance to foreign tyranny until the present day, we mark with pleasure and with gratitude the same uniform and consistent character the same warm and devoted attachment to liberty and the Republic, the same Roman love of your country, her rights, her peace, her honour, her prosperity."

The language of rhetoric is not always the language of truth. But never has a ruler better merited the gratitude of his countrymen; and on this occasion at least democracy, often fickle in its favours and inconstant in its affections, rewarded a faithful champion with every tribute of gratitude, honour, and esteem as he stepped with quiet dignity from the public stage to rejoin his neighbours at Charlottesville.

A

BOOK VII

LAST YEARS AT MONTICELLO

CHAPTER I

THE MADISON ADMINISTRATIONS. 1809-1817

Nec vos, dulcissima mundi
Nomina, vos Musae, libertas, otia, libri,
Hortique sylvaeque anima remanente relinquam.

Nor by me e'er shall you,

You of all names the sweetest, and the best,
You Muses, books, and liberty, and rest;
You gardens, fields, and woods forsaken be,
As long as life itself forsakes not me.

- ABRAHAM COWLEY

STATESMAN is not always seen at his best when the time comes for him to relinquish high office. But Jefferson handed over the reins of government to James Madison with something more than the composure of a philosopher; for like Wordsworth's Happy Warrior, 'conspicuous object in a nation's eye,' he was

"Yet a soul, whose master bias leans

To homefelt pleasures and to gentle scenes."

It was in this spirit that he wrote just before leaving Washington to his friend Dupont de Nemours in Paris: "Within a few days I retire to my family, my books, and farms; and having gained the harbour myself I shall look on my friends still buffeting the storm, with anxiety in

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