general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind have not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God." Nothing of him was impaired but his body, even then. But that grew steadily weaker until he lay upon his bed, serene, painless, cheerful, in full possession of his reason, but helpless and dying. He conversed calmly with his family concerning his affairs, in the tone of a person about to set out upon a journey which could not be avoided. He mentioned to his friends a fact of his mental condition that seemed to strike him as peculiar, — that the scenes and events of the Revolutionary period kept recurring to him. The curtains of his bed, he said, were brought over in the first ship that arrived after the peace of 1782; and he related many incidents of those eventful times. Once, while he was dozing, he placed his hands as if he were writing with his right on a tablet held in his left, and murmured, "Warn the committee to be on the alert." When his grandson said that he thought he was a little better, he replied, "Do not imagine for a moment that I feel the smallest solicitude about the result. I am like an old watch, with a pinion worn out here, and a wheel there, until it can go no longer." Upon imagining that he heard a clergyman of the neighborhood in the next room, he said, "I have no objection to see him as a kind and good neighbor; " meaning, as his grandson thought, that he did not desire to see him in his professional character. He repeated on his death-bed a remark which he had made a hundred times before: His calumniators he had never thought were assailing him, but a being non-existent, of their own. imagining, to whom they had given the name of Thomas Jefferson. Observing a little grandson eight years old in the room, he said with a smile, "George does not understand what all this means." He spoke much of Mr. Madison, who, he hoped, would succeed him as rector of the university. He eulogized him justly as one of the best of men and one of the greatest of citizens.

During the 3d of July he dozed hour after hour, under the influence of opiates, rousing occasionally, and uttering a few words. It was evident that his end was very near; and a fervent desire arose in all minds that he should live until the day which he had assisted to consecrate half a century before. He, too, desired it. At eleven in the evening Mr. N. P. Trist, the young husband of one of his grand

daughters, sat by his pillow watching his face, and turning every minute toward the slow-moving hands of the clock, dreading lest the flickering flame should go out before midnight. "This is the Fourth?" whispered the dying patriot. Mr. Trist could not bear to say, "Not yet;” so he remained silent. "This is the Fourth?" again asked Mr. Jefferson in a whisper. Mr. Trist nodded assent. "Ah!" he breathed; and an expression of satisfaction passed over his countenance. Again he sunk into sleep, which all about him feared was the slumber of death. But midnight came; the night passed; the morning dawned; the sun rose; the new day progressed; and still he breathed, and occasionally indicated a desire by words or looks. At twenty minutes to one in the afternoon he ceased to live.

At Quincy, on the granite shore of distant Massachusetts, another memorable death-scene was passing on this Fourth of July, 1826.

John Adams, at the age of ninety-one, had been an enjoyer of existence down almost to the dawn of the fiftieth Fourth of July. He voted for Monroe in 1820. His own son was president of the United States in 1826. He used to sit many hours of every day, tranquilly listening to members of his family, while they read to him the new books with which friends in Boston, knowing his taste, kept him abundantly supplied. He, who was a formed man when Dr. Johnson was writing his Dictionary, lived to enjoy Scott's novels and Byron's poetry. His grandson, Mr. Charles Francis Adams, the worthy heir of an honorable name, then a youth of eighteen, used to sit by him, he tells us, for days together, reading to him, "watching the noble image of a serene old age, or listening with unabated interest to the numerous anecdotes, the reminiscences of the past, and the speculations upon the questions of all times, in which he loved to indulge." On the last day of June, 1826, though his strength had much declined of late, he was still well enough to receive and chat with a neighbor, the orator of the coming anniversary, who called to ask him for a toast to be offered at the usual banquet. "I will give you," said the old man, "INDEPENDENCE FOREVER!" Being asked if he wished to add any thing to it, he replied, "Not a word." The day came. It was evident that he could not long survive. He lingered, tranquil and without pain, to the setting of the The last words that he articulated were thought to be, "Thomas Jefferson still lives." As the sun sank below the horizon, a noise of

sun.

great shouting was heard in the village, and reached even the apartment in which the old man lay. It was the enthusiastic cheers called forth by his toast,-Independence forever. Before the sounds. died away he had breathed his last.

The coincidence of the death of these two venerable men on the day associated with their names in all minds did not startle the whole country at once, on the morning of the next day, as such an event now would. Slowly the news of Mr. Adams's death spread over the Northern States, while that of Mr. Jefferson's was borne more slowly over the Southern; so that almost every person heard of the death of one several days before he learned the death of the other. The public mind had been wrought to an unusual degree of patriotic fervor by the celebration of the nation's birth, when few orators had failed to allude to the sole survivors of the body which had declared independence. That one of them should have departed on that day struck every mind as something remarkable. But when it became known that the author of the Declaration and its most powerful defender had both breathed their last on the Fourth of July, the fiftieth since they had set it apart from the roll of common days, it seemed as if Heaven had given its visible and unerring sanction to the work they had done.

Among Mr. Jefferson's papers was found a rough sketch in ink of a stone to mark his grave. He designed it to be an obelisk of granite eight feet high; and he wished it to bear the following inscription, which it does:

HERE WAS BURIED

THOMAS JEFFERSON,

AUTHOR

OF THE DECLARATION OF
AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE,

OF

THE STATUTE OF VIRGINIA

FOR RELIGIOUS FREEDOM, AND
FATHER OF THE UNIVERSITY

OF VIRGINIA.

His remains were placed in the family burial-ground, near the summit of Monticello, on the spot selected nearly seventy years before by Dabney Carr and himself, and where the dust of Carr

had reposed for half a century, awaiting the coming of his friend. His wife lies on one side of him, and his youngest daughter, his fragile and clinging Maria, on the other.

But the utmost efforts of his executor did not suffice to retain even this burial-ground, still less the mansion and estate, in the possession of the family. Thomas Jefferson died more than solvent; but the extreme depression of values in Virginia in 1826 and the few following years, compelled the total sacrifice of the property. The debts were paid to the uttermost farthing; but Martha Jefferson and her children lost their home, and had no means of providing another. These circumstances becoming known, the legislatures of South Carolina and Louisiana each voted to Mrs. Randolph an honorable gift of ten thousand dollars. She lived to the year 1836, when she died suddenly at the age of sixty-three, and her remains were buried close to those of her parents. A large number of her descendants survive to this day.

CHAPTER LXXIII.

SUMMARY.

JEFFERSON was among the most fortunate of men. In modern times a person, in order to fulfil the requirements of an eminent career, needs to be so variously equipped and so richly furnished, that few individuals can hold on to the end unless fortune begins by placing them on vantage-ground. A strong father must usually precede the gifted son, and break the road for him. It is not enough, in the realm of the intellect, for the father to conquer leisure for the son, though that is desirable. He must be the beginning of the boy's culture, and save him from the melancholy waste of unlearning in maturity what he had learned in childhood. We find, accordingly, that many of our recent famous names belong to two persons, -father and child; and perhaps this will be more frequently the case as knowledge increases and the standard of attainment rises. We have two Pitts, two Mills, two Macaulays, two Niebuhrs, two Darwins, two Landseers, two Collinses, two D'Israelis, two Beechers, two Bryants, two Arnolds. We have had men, too, whose career was fatally harmed and limited only because they had but one parent, and that one not a father.

On the other hand, no one is more likely to have been ill-born than a person sprung from an ancient family. The marriages which perpetuate an historic house, being usually prompted by considerations of rank and estate, cannot but result, at last, in reducing both the volume and the vivacity of the average brain of the family. This we should infer from the little that is known of the art of breeding superior creatures, if the fact were not plainly exhibited in the quality of existing aristocracies and royal lines. In all literature there can be found no delineations of vulgarity so unmitigated as those with which the masters of modern fiction (from Scott to George