pounds fourteen shillings and ten pence," besides twenty thousand acres of land, and certain taxes that yielded three hundred pounds a year. Other benefactors had bequeathed and given it property, until it enjoyed an annual income of three thousand pounds; which was enough, with the tuition fees, to maintain an efficient college. But, like Harvard and Yale, the institution was hampered by the incongruous conditions imposed by the donors of its capital. One important estate was given for the express purpose of maintaining Indians at the college; and Indians were maintained accordingly. But Indians cannot receive our civilization. If the college had any success with an Indian youth, he was no sooner tamed than he sickened and died. The rest may have assumed the white man's habits while they remained at Williamsburg; but the very day that they rejoined their tribe they threw off their college clothes, resumed their old costumes and weapons, and ran whooping into the forest, irreclaimable savages. And so this fondly-cherished project of the benefactors ended in utter failure. But the estate remained; its income could only be spent in one way; and hence the Indian nuisance still clung to the college, wasting its resources and lessening its attractiveness.

A leading object of the founders was to provide learned ministers of the Established Church; and consequently there was a professor of "divinity," another of moral philosophy; and the only special duty assigned to the president, in return for his two hundred pounds a year and his handsome house, was the delivery of four theological lectures per annum. As if to give still greater prominence to the department of theology, the reverend president usually held the office of commissary, or bishop's representative, at a hundred pounds a year, and had charge of the parish church of Williamsburg, which swelled his income to about six hundred a year, an official revenue only exceeded by that of the governor. Those who know for what kind of reasons the fat things in church and state were usually given in the good old times will not be surprised to learn that one of the commissary-presidents of the college, in Jefferson's youth, could not proceed against the clergy for drunkenness, because he was himself a drunkard; nor will he be at a loss how to explain the indications of college riot that lurk in the letters of the time.

Moreover, the chief object of the founders was not accomplished. As the parishes were usually assigned to English clergymen, whom

the Bishop of London sent to Virginia because there was nothing for them in England, few young Virginians entered the college with a view to compete for a church-living of sixteen thousand pounds of tobacco per annum. Yet the costly professorships of divinity had to be kept up, and the college was obliged to continue a theological seminary without theologians.

Dead branches are not only merely inert and useless: they injure and disfigure the tree. This college, which ought to have attracted the élite of Virginia youth, and sent them home strong and enlightened to save beautiful Virginia from the blight of tobacco, repelled many of them, and seldom regenerated those who came. Young men whose fathers could afford the expense went to English Eton, Oxford, and Cambridge, often returning as ignorant as they went out, and dissolute beyond hope of reform. Of late years the college had been filling up, more and more, with boys who came to learn the rudiments of Latin; and it was some time before a clear distinction was made between these and the students proper of the college. Jefferson found the institution a medley of college, Indian mission, and grammar-school, ill-governed, and distracted by dissensions among its ruling powers. The Bishop of London, who, as chancellor of the institution, had the nomination of its professors, sometimes sent out men so manifestly incompetent or unfit, that the trustees would not admit them; and others, being admitted, led scandalous lives, and filled the college, as the trustees said, with riot, contention, and dissipation. Jefferson in old age wrote of "the regular annual riots and battles between the students and the townboys, before the Revolution, part of which I was, and the many and more serious affrays of later times." On Sundays, we are told, when the divinity professors and reverend president were away performing parochial duties, the more orderly students went off shooting, with their dogs behind them, and the others made the village resound. with their noise. It was not until several years after Jefferson's. time, that the rights of the several authorities of the college were so defined that the suppression of these disorders became possible.

But out of this chaos Thomas Jefferson contrived to pick a genuine university education; because, among the crowd of its schoolmasters, mission teachers, divinity professors, and bishop's protégés, there was, by some strange chance, one man of knowledge and ability, one man who did not "survey the universe from his parish bel

fry," one skilful and sympathetic teacher. "It was my great good fortune," he says, in his too brief autobiography, "and what probably fixed the destinies of my life, that Dr. William Small of Scotland was then professor of mathematics. A man profound in most of the useful branches of science, with a happy talent of communication, correct and gentlemanly manners, and an enlarged, liberal mind. He, most happily for me, soon became attached to me, and made me his daily companion when not engaged in the school; and from his conversation I got my first views of the expansion of science, and of the system of things in which we are placed. Fortunately the philosophical chair became vacant soon after my arrival in college, and he was appointed to fill it per interim; and he was the first who ever gave, in that college, regular lectures in ethics, rhetoric, and belles-lettres." It is a pleasure to copy a passage like this, one more testimonial to add to the long list of similar ones, from Marcus Aurelius to Lord Brougham, which attest the immeasurable value of an enlightened teacher of youth.

I wish we had something more particular of this gentleman. Jefferson's college intimate, John Page, governor of Virginia in later years, speaks of him as "my beloved professor," who was "afterward the great Dr. Small of Birmingham, the darling friend of Darwin." And he confesses that he did not derive all the benefit from his instruction that he might; for he was "too sociable to study as Mr. Jefferson did, who could tear himself away from his dearest friends to fly to his studies."

Another friend of Jefferson, John Burk, author of a "History of Virginia," insinuates that Dr. Small was not too orthodox in his opinions. The professors, he remarks, were usually chosen from "the licensed champions of orthodoxy;" by which he appears to mean the clergy: but, "now and then, in spite of the jealous scrutiny of the metropolitan, some unbeliever would steal into the fold." This, he adds, was particularly the case with the mathematical department, for which divines were generally incompetent; and he illustrates this observation by mentioning "the friend and companion of the poetic and philosophic Darwin," Professor Small, who had formed the minds of so many of the youth of the Province. It is certain the college was beginning to have an ill name among the religious people, not on account of the bad lives and inefficient teaching of some of "the divines" connected with it, but of the heretical opinions supposed

to prevail among the students. The true reason, it is said, why James Madison went to Princeton College, was the dread his parents had lest he should imbibe those opinions if he attended the college nearer home. Edmund Randolph, who succeeded Mr. Jefferson in the office of Secretary of State, was a student of William and Mary about this time. He used to say that such heresies were much in vogue at the college, and he had a vivid recollection of a scene that followed his utterance of something in unison with the prevailing tone. One of the leaders of the new opinions patted him on the head, and called him a promising youth for daring to express so bold a thought. The fact remains, however, that all the professors were required by law to subscribe to the Thirty-nine Articles, and all their pupils to say the Church-of-England Catechism.

CHAPTER VI.

AT COLLEGE.

THE student settled to his work. Without neglecting Latin and Greek, his chief employment since his ninth year, he now became, under Professor Small's tuition, enamoured of mathematics. That science, as he wrote in later years, became "the passion of his life;" and he could read off in his youth, "with the facility of common discourse," processes which at seventy cost him "labor and time and slow investigation." It is evident, from many trifling indications, that he subdued mathematics to his will, and employed it all his days as a familiar, obedient servant. Part of his travelling apparatus, even on short journeys, was a box of instruments and a book of logarithms, and he always had a rule in his pocket. Professor Small, who left Scotland about the time (1756) that Professor Black was appointed to the chair of chemistry which he covered with immortal lustre, James Watt and the improved steam-engine being. among its incidental results, shared in the new enthusiasm for applied science; and he imparted it to his young companion. There was some apparatus, it appears, at William and Mary. Doubtless Professor Small possessed the electrical tubes, one of which Benjamin Franklin, printer, had rubbed with so much effect fifteen years before. Details of the student's scientific course we do not possess ; but we know that he derived from his walks and talks with Professor Small the habit of surveying objects with the eyes of science, and subjecting them to scientific tests, one of the chief points of difference between the educated and the ignorant mind.

He worked hard in college, and ever harder, as his circle widened, too hard at last, - fifteen hours a day, as he said himself when talking of college days. He kept a horse or two at Williamsburg, it appears (and riding on horseback should be part of every college