He refused also an offer, most munificent for that day, of a thousand dollars for a course of scientific lectures in Philadelphia. His labors in America were chiefly theological; and he resided usually on his son's farm in Northumberland County, Pennsylvania. He was an immense personage in his day. The public were constantly reminded of his existence by some publication bearing his name. According to Allibone, he gave the public one hundred and forty-one separate works.

In those days people attached much more importance than we do to a man's religious opinions; and consequently Dr. Priestley, though an exquisite Christian in temper and practice, incurred odium for his heterodoxy. The famous Robert Hall, a great admirer of Priestley, hearing one day that he had been ill spoken of on account of his regard for Priestley, broke out in this magnificent manner :

"Are we suddenly fallen back into the darkness and ignorance of the Middle Ages, during which the spell of a stupid and unfeeling uniformity bound the nations in iron slumber, that it is become a crime to praise a man for talents which the whole world admire, and for virtues which his enemies confess, merely because his religious creed is erroneous? If any thing could sink orthodoxy into contempt, it would be its association with such Gothic barbarity of sentiment, such reptile manners."

Thus spoke an English dissenter. But Dr. Priestley, after escaping the violence of re-action in England, crossed the ocean at a time when re-action was about to resume power in America. Even the honors paid him on his arrival had something of a partisan character; and Republicans made it as much a point to pay him attention as Federalists to avoid doing so. All the Franklin circle of Philadelphia gathered round him; and the Philosophical Society, founded by Franklin, gave him cordial welcome. Jefferson, during the coming years, found solace in his society and correspondence, and went to hear him as often as he preached in the Unitarian chapel.

It stirred Jefferson's indignation, that a man of science so amiable as Priestley, who, he thought, honored his country by selecting it as an asylum, should have been made the object of party vituperation.

CHAPTER LIII.

JEFFERSON AS A FARMER.

EIGHT bushels of wheat to the acre is not brilliant agriculture; nor could the production of eighteen bushels of Indian corn to the acre, at the present time, be thrown in the face of a rival farmer with any reasonable hope of abasing his pride. But in 1796, when Mr. Jefferson had been two years at home after retiring from the office of secretary of state, and was showing his home-farm to an old French friend, the Duke de la Rochefoucauld, these were the figures he gave as the utmost he could then extract from his lands in the garden of Virginia. The land was cheap enough, however, -four or five dollars an acre; and wheat sold in Richmond at two dollars and a half a bushel. Mr. Jefferson boasted that the wheat grown upon his mountain slopes was whiter than the low-country wheat, and averaged five or six pounds heavier to the bushel.

Overseers, during his ten years' absence in the public service, had ravaged his farms in the fine old fashion of old Virginia. The usual routine was this: When the forest was first cleared, laying bare the rich, deep, black, virgin soil, the slow accumulation of ages of growth and decay, tobacco was grown for five successive years. That broke the heart of the land, and it was allowed to rest a while. Then tobacco was raised again, until the crop ceased to be remunerative; and then the fields were abandoned to the crops sown by the methods of Nature; and she made haste to cover up with a growth of evergreens the outraged nakedness of the soil. But Jefferson had, long before, abandoned the culture of the exacting weed on his Albemarle estate. His overseers, therefore, had another rotation, which exhausted the soil more completely, if less rapidly. They sowed wheat in the virgin soil among the stumps; next year, corn; then wheat again; then corn again; and maintained this rotation

as long as they could gather a harvest of five bushels of wheat or ten bushels of corn to the acre; after which Nature was permitted to have her way with the soil again, and new lands were cleared for spoliation. There was then no lack of land for the application of this method of exhaustion. Out of Mr. Jefferson's five thousand five hundred and ninety-one acres and two-thirds in Albemarle, less than twelve hundred were under cultivation. His estate of Poplar Forest was nearly as large, but only eight hundred acres were cleared. The land upon which the Natural Bridge was situated, one hundred and fifty-seven acres in extent, was a wilderness; though he always hoped to build a hut there for retirement and repose, amid a scene which awoke all his enthusiasm.

This system of agriculture wasted something more costly than Virginia land, namely, African muscle. One hundred and fifty-four persons called Thomas Jefferson master; equivalent, perhaps, to a working-force of eighty efficient field-hands. Give an Illinois or Ohio farmer of ability the command of such a force, on the simple condition of maintaining it in the style of old Virginia, and in fifteen years he could be a millionnaire. But, on the system practised in Albemarle in 1795, the slaves had two years' work to do in one. No sooner was the wretched crop of the summer gathered in, and the grain trodden out with horses, and the pitiful result set afloat in barges bound for Richmond, than the slaves were formed into chopping-gangs, who made the woods melodious with the music of the axe during the long fall and winter. All the arts by which the good farmer contrives to give back to his fields a little more than he takes from them were of necessity neglected; and the strenuous force of the eighty hands was squandered in an endless endeavor to make good the ravage of the fields by the ravage of the woods. Mr. Jefferson's eight bushels of wheat, his eighteen of corn, and his scant ton of clover to the acre, was the beginning of victory, instead of the continuation of defeat.

It was on the 16th of January, 1794, that he surveyed once more his Albemarle estate from the summit of Monticello. Every object upon which he looked betrayed the ten years' absence of the master: the house unfinished, and its incompleteness made conspicuous by the rude way in which it was covered up; the grounds and gardens advanced beyond their condition when he had last rambled over by the side of the mother of his children; his fields all lying

t.

distinct before him like a map, irregular in shape, separated by zigzag fences and a dense growth of bushes; outhouses dilapidated; roads in ill-repair; the whole scene demanding the intelligent regard which he was burning to bestow upon it. Never was there a Yankee in whom the instinct to improve was more insatiable; and seldom, out of old Ireland, has there been an estate that furnished such an opportunity for its gratification as this one in old Virginia. "Ten years' abandonment of my lands," he wrote to General Washington, "has brought on them a degree of degradation far beyond what I had expected."

After the lapse of two years and a half, the Duke de la Rochefoucauld saw a different prospect from the portico of Monticello. The summit, indeed, was disfigured with the litter of building; for, as the exile informs us, Mr. Jefferson, who had formerly studied architecture and landscape-gardening in books only, had since seen in Europe the noblest triumphs of both, and was endeavoring now to improve upon his original designs. Monticello, the duke remarks, had been infinitely superior before to all other homes in America; but in the course of another year he thought, when the central dome would be finished, and the new designs happily blended with the old, the house would rank with the most pleasant mansions in France and England. And how enchanting the panorama! Nothing to break the view to the ocean, from which, though it was a hundred and fifty miles distant, the cooling breeze reached the mountain on a summer day about two in the afternoon. The traveller thought the prospect faultless except in two particulars,— too much forest and too little water. His European eye craved a cultivated expanse, craved castle-crowned heights, the spire piercing the distant grove, the farm-house, the cottage, and the village clustering in the vale; and without a mass of water, he thought, the grandest view lacks the last charm.

In the whole world it had been difficult to find men who had more in common than these two, the exile from distracted France, and the American who never loved France so much as when the banded despotisms of Europe had driven her mad. Jefferson had last seen the duke, when, as president of the National Assembly of 1789, he was striving, with Jefferson's cordial sympathy, to save kingship and establish liberty. It was La Rochefoucauld who sought the king's presence at Versailles on a memorable occasion

in July, 1789; and laid before that bewildered locksmith the real state of things at Paris. "But this is a revolt, then!" said the king. "Sire," replied the duke, "it is a revolution!" Two days after the Bastille was in the hands of the people. Besides the political accord between Jefferson and his guest, they were both improvers by nature, and both most zealous agriculturists. years the French nobleman had had upon his estate a model farm for the purpose of introducing into his neighborhood English methods of tillage and improved utensils. He had maintained also an industrial school, and endeavored to plant in France the cotton manufacture which was beginning to make the world tributary to England. In a word, he was a citizen after the best American pattern, which is another way of saying that he was a man after Jefferson's own heart.

We can easily imagine the family group as they would gather on the portico to see the master of the house and his guest mount for a morning's ride over the farms. Jefferson was now approaching fifty-three, and his light hair was touched with gray; but his face was as ruddy, his tall form as erect, his tread as elastic, his seat in the saddle as easy, as when at twenty-one he had galloped from Shadwell with Dabney Carr. From his youth temperate and chaste, keeping faith with man and woman, occupied always with pursuits worthy of a man, neither narrowed by a small ambition, nor perverted by malignant passions, nor degraded by vulgar appetites, equable, cheery, and affectionate, he only reached his prime at sixty, and shone with mellowing lustre twenty years longer, giving the world assurance of an unwasted manhood. The noble exile was forty-nine, with thirty-one years of vigorous life before him. The eldest daughter of the house, at home now because her father was at home, the mother of three fine children, had assumed something of matronly dignity during her six years of married life; and her husband had become a perfect Randolph, - tall, gaunt, restless, difficult to manage, and not very capable of managing himself. He vented superfluous energy, Mr. Randall tells us, in riding eighty miles a day through Virginia mud, and, rather than take the trouble of riding another mile or two to a bridge, would swim his foaming steed across a river in full flood. If making.cavalry charges were the chief end of man, he had been an admirable specimen of our race; but, for life as it is in piping times of peace, he was not