conveyed the idea of affectation; and what would have been regarded as improprieties of dress or manners in others, was forgiven in him as a sort of idiosyncrasy, which he could not help, and of which he was not even conscious.

So young a man as Mr. Jefferson could not but be greatly flattered at being received into the intimate society of three such men as have been mentioned, since he must have known that it could have proceeded only from a high sense of his merit; and he himself bears testimony to the instruction he derived from their conversation.

Two years before he was admitted to the bar, and while he was yet a student in Williamsburg, the misunderstanding between Great Britain and colonies had commenced, and the subject of their respective rights had become a theme of universal interest and discussion in America. He would naturally have sided with the great mass of his countrymen in this controversy; but the ardour with which he espoused their cause was augmented by the circumstances in which he was placed. He had frequent opportunities of listening both to the open debates, and the private conversations of the members of the Legislature, consisting at that time of many men of intelligent, and highly cultivated minds: the able lawyer with whom he studied was among the foremost in resisting the pretensions of Great Britain: and above all, eloquence, whose power is never so great as when it is exerted in the cause of patriotism, lent its magical influence, to add the fervours of passion to the convictions of the understanding.

It was during the session of the Assembly in May, 1765, that he first had an opportunity of hearing that extraordinary self-educated orator, Patrick Henry. The occasion on which he most distinguished himself was on the resolutions prepared by himself on the stamp act, which had passed in the preceding January, and had reached Virginia during the

session of the Legislature. After the lapse of half a century, Mr. Jefferson declares, that he never heard such strains of eloquence from any other man, and that " Mr. Henry appeared to speak as Homer wrote." Somewhat must be deducted from this high-wrought panegyric, both for the inexperience of the hearer, and his warm enthusiasm in the cause of the orator; but we cannot make a large allowance for these biases, without impugning the accounts that are given of Mr. Henry's rare powers of elocution by all who ever heard him speak.

The repeal of the Stamp Act the year after it was passed produced a short-lived suspension of the ill feeling between Great Britain and her colonies; but the attempt made by her in the following year, 1767, to draw a revenue from them, in the less obvious form of an impost, small as that impost was, renewed the dispute, which, in eight years of irritation, was aggravated into open war; and, in eight years more, terminated in the complete overthrow of British authority.

In the spring of 1766 he went to Philadelphia, for the ostensible purpose of being there inoculated, but, no doubt, also for the gratification of a liberal euriosity. He made this journey of three hundred miles in a one-horse chair, and experienced a full share of the inconveniences incident to travelling in that mode, and at that period. The first day his pampered steed ran off with him twice. He rode through the whole of the next in a drenching rain, " without meeting with a single house to which he could repair for shelter;" and, on the third, he was near being drowned in fording the Pamunkey. He, however, called at the country-seats of two or three gentlemen of his acquaintance, where he met with some of his old college associates, and in these re-unions, forgot the disasters of flood and field.

He also took Annapolis in his way, and found the General Assembly of Maryland then in session. In a letter to his

friend Page, from which the preceding particulars were gleaned, he gives an amusing description of the loose and irregular course of proceeding in the Maryland Legislature, so strongly contrasted with the order and dignity which had long characterized the House of Burgesses in Virginia. He then adds: "The situation of this place is extremely beautiful, and very commodious for trade, having a most secure port, capable of receiving the largest vessels - those of 400 hhds. being able to brush against the sides of the dock. The houses are in general better than those in Williamsburg; but the gardens more indifferent. The two towns seem much of a size. They have no public buildings worth mentioning, except a Governor's house, the hall of which, after being nearly finished, they have suffered to go to ruin. I would give you an account of the rejoicings here on the repeal of the Stamp Act*, but this you will probably see in print before my letter can reach you. I shall proceed tomorrow to Philadelphia, where I shall make the stay neces sary for inoculation; thence going on to New York, I shall return by water to Williamsburg, about the middle of July, till which time you have the prayers of, dear Page,

"Your affectionate friend,

"T. JEFFERSON."

* At this time he little dreamt that in the very spot where he saw the people rejoicing that Great Britain consented to relinquish a paltry tax, while she asserted unlimited powers of legislation, he should witness the ratification of a treaty by which she acknowledged her late suppliant colonies to be sovereign states; that here, too, he was to behold the more imposing spectacle of the victorious commander of their armies voluntarily resigning his authority to those from whom he had received itand that be himself, then a stranger and unknown, was to bear a conspicuous part in these memorable scenes. But contrasts of this character, though not often so striking as these, have become so familiar in the United States, where everything is in a state of rapid progression, as no longer to excite wonder,

Of his success as a practitioner of law he has left no account, and the defect can be but imperfectly supplied from his contemporaries, of whom the few that survive have no precise information on the subject. They state, however, that, as a speaker, his diction was both fluent and perspicuous; but that his voice was neither strong nor clear; and that during the seven or eight years that he practised in the General Court, he was gradually rising to the foremost rank as an accurate, learned, and able lawyer. This is no moderate praise, when it is recollected that the court in which he practised was the highest judicial tribunal in Virginia; that here all causes of importance, civil and criminal, were decided; and here, of course, he encountered the highest forensic talents of the colony, which, always in a state of preparation, were stimulated to their highest efforts by collision and emulation. Mr. Jefferson's manuscripts attest the labour of his legal researches, as well as his fertility of argument and nicety of discrimination, and leave no doubt that he would have attained the first place in this road to distinction, if the political struggle of his country had not diverted him to another and a higher destiny.

But the time had now come when Mr. Jefferson was himself to be an actor in that great civil contest, of which he had been for some years an anxious spectator. In 1769, being then twenty-six years of age, he was elected a member of the House of Burgesses, from the county of Albemarle. Lord Botetourt, the Governor, having convened the Legislature in May, resolutions in opposition to those which had been recently passed by both Houses of Parliament on the proceedings of Massachusetts, were unanimously adopted by the Burgesses, who also voted an address to the King. In these papers they re-asserted the right of laying taxes in Virginia to be exclusively vested in its own Legislature; insisted on their privilege of petitioning for a redress of

grievances, as well as of procuring the concurrence of the other colonies; and pronounced the mode of trial of persons charged with treason in the colonies, which had been lately recommended in Parliament, to be illegal and unconstitutional. The last resolution referred to a joint address of the two houses to the King, in which it was proposed, that the treasonable practices in the colonies should be prosecuted under a statute of Henry the Eighth, according to which the accused might be transported for trial to England.

The Governor, having heard of these proceedings, without waiting for the official communication of them, abruptly dissolved the Assembly*. But on the following day the members assembled at the Raleigh tavern, and in a room which then bore the classic name of the Apollo, and which it still retains, they entered into articles of agreement, or, as it was then termed " Association," by which they pledged their honour not to import, nor, after the first of September ensuing, purchase certain specified kinds of British merchandise, so long as the Act of Parliament for raising a revenue in America was unrepealed; and this agreement they recommended to the general adoption of their constituents. Among the eighty-eight signatures to this " Association," are to be seen the names of George Washington, Peyton Randolph, Patrick Henry, Richard Henry Lee, Thomas Jefferson, and more than half the remainder afterwards held conspicuous stations either in the civil or military service of their country. Similar Associations had been entered into the year before in Massachusetts, and this mode of appealing

Mr. Jefferson, at this his first session, manifested that interest in the subject of slavery which he so often afterwards exhibited. His proposition then, however, was not for a general emancipation, as it has been sometimes stated by his undiscriminating admirers; but merely to remove the restrictions which the laws had previously imposed on voluntary manumission, and even this was rejected. The general right to manumit was not given in Virginia until the year 1782.