that the only reward he had ever desired for his thirteen years of public service was the good-will of his fellow citizens, and he had not even obtained that; nay, he had lost the little share of their esteem he had once enjoyed. Thus he exaggerated the injustice done him, and nursed, Achilles-like, his mortification.

For once,

In August, Lafayette forwarded to him through the lines a letter from the President of Congress, telling him that, six weeks before, Congress had again elected him to a foreign mission. But he would not be consoled. the health of his wife and the condition of his family (their infant child had died a few weeks before) were such as to permit their attempting the voyage together. He might have gone to Europe in 1781; he would have gone, but for this slight show of legislative censure. "I lose an opportunity," he wrote to Lafayette, "the only one I ever had, and perhaps ever shall have, of combining public service with private gratification; of seeing countries whose improvements in science, in arts, in civilization it has been my fortune to admire at a distance, but never to see, and at the same time of lending some aid to a cause which has been handed on from its first organization to its present stage by every effort of which my poor faculties were capable. These, however, have not been such as to give satisfaction to some of my countrymen, and it has become necessary for me to remain in the State till a later period in the present year than is consistent with an acceptance of what has been offered me."

Before the Legislature met again, the winter of Virginia's discontent was made glorious summer by the surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown. All thought of censure was swallowed up in that stupendous joy. December 19, 1781, exactly a month after the surrender, Jefferson, occupying his ancestral seat as member for Albemarle, to which he had been re-elected without one dissentient vote, - rose in his place, reminded the House of the intimated

censure of the last session, and said he was ready to meet and answer any charges that might be brought against him. No one responded. His accuser was absent. There was silence in the chamber. After a pause, a member rose and offered a resolution thanking him for his "impartial, upright, and attentive administration"; which passed both Council and Assembly unanimously.

Even this did not heal the wound. As he refrained from attending the spring session of the Legislature, James Monroe wrote to him a letter of remonstrance, telling him that the public remarked his absence and were disposed to blame him for withholding his help at so difficult a time. He answered, that, before announcing his determination to retire from public life, he had examined well his heart, to learn whether any lurking particle of political ambition remained in it to make him uneasy in a private station. "I became satisfied," he continued, “that every fibre of that passion was thoroughly eradicated." He thought, too, that thirteen years of public service had given him a right now to withdraw and devote his energies to the care and education of the two families dependent upon him, and the restoration of estates impaired by neglect or laid waste by war. Nor could he forget the wrong done him in the Assembly. "I felt," he wrote, "that these injuries, for such they have since been acknowledged, had inflicted a wound on my spirit which will only be cured by the all-healing grave." For these and other reasons, he held to his purpose to withdraw from all participation in public affairs, and dedicate the whole residue of his life to the education of his children, the culture of his lands, and the sweet toils of the library. He concluded by inviting his young friend to visit him at Monticello. "You will find me busy," he said, "but in lighter occupations."

Yes, he was busy; but few persons who look over the work he was then doing regard it as a very light occupa

tion. The French government had instructed its minister at Philadelphia to gather and transmit to Paris information respecting the States of the American Confederacy; and the secretary of legation had sent Mr. Jefferson a list of questions to answer concerning Virginia. From childhood, he had observed nature in his native land with the curiosity of an intelligent and sympathetic mind; and, in his maturer age, even in the busiest and most anxious times, he had been ever a student, an inquirer, a collector. All the stores of knowledge accumulated in so many years he now poured upon paper, and interspersed subtle and curious essays upon points of natural history, geography, morals, politics, and literature. M. de Marbois must have been astonished to receive from him, not a series of short, dry answers to official questions, but a volume, teeming with suggestive fact and thought, warm with humane sentiment, and couched in the fluent language natural to a sanguine and glowing mind. It is in this work that the chapter occurs which gave so many powerful texts to our noble Abolitionists, during their eighty years' war with slavery:

"The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other. Our children see this and learn to imitate it; for man is an imitative animal. This quality is the germ of all education in him. From his cradle to his grave he is learning to do what he sees others do. The parent storms, the child looks on, catches the lineaments of wrath, puts on the same airs in the circle of smaller slaves, gives a loose to the worst of passions, and, thus nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it with odious peculiarities. That man must be a prodigy who can retain his manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances. . . . . I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep for

ever; that, considering numbers, nature, and natural means only, a revolution of the wheel of fortune, an exchange of situations, is among possible events; that it may become probable by supernatural interference! The Almighty has no attribute which can take side with us in such a contest."

At the close of the war, then, Jefferson supposed his public life ended. He was sure of it. He had publicly said so. Monroe had remonstrated with him; Madison had remonstrated; his old constituents and Congress both solicited his services; but he could not be lured again from his pleasant mountain home and its delicious duties into the arena of public strife, whence he had but lately issued, wounded and sore. I suppose he was wrong in this; for if he, with his ample fortune, his fine endowments, his health, his knowledge, and his culture, was not bound to render some service to Virginia in 1782, of whom could public service be reasonably demanded?

It was a delightful dream while it lasted, that of spending a long life in the Garden of Virginia, with an adored wife, troops of affectionate children, and an ever-growing library. We have a glimpse of him there in the spring of 1782, when he was visited by one of the officers of the French Army, MajorGeneral the Marquis de Chastellux. During this year, while the negotiations for peace were lingering, the French officers were much in American society, making an impress upon manners and character that is not yet obliterated. Americans were peculiarly susceptible then to the influence of men whose demeanor and tone were in such agreeable contrast to those of the English. The French were exceedingly beloved at the time; not the officers only, but the men as well; for had they not marched through the country without burning a rail, without touching an apple in an orchard, without ogling a girl by the roadside?

The influence of the French officers upon the young gentlemen of the United States was not an unmixed

good. It was from them that the American of eighty years ago caught the ridiculous affectation of fighting duels, which raged like a mania from 1790 to 1804. The French nobleman of the old school had also acquired an art, which men of our race never attain, the art of making sensual vice seem elegant and becoming. AngloSaxons are only respectable when they are strictly virtuous. It has not been given to us to lie with grace, and sin with dignity. We are nothing if not moral. And, doubtless, if a man permits himself to conduct his life on an animal basis, it is honester in him, it is better for others, for him to appear the beast he is. The dissoluteness of the English officers at Philadelphia and New York, being open and offensive, was not calculated to make American youth cast aside the lessons of purity which they had learned in their clean and honorable homes. Dashing down Chestnut Street in a curricle with a brazen hussy by your side, is not as pretty a feat as carrying on what was styled "an intrigue," in an elegant house. It was these French of ficers who infected many American youth besides Hamilton and Burr and their young friends with the most er-、 roneous and pernicious idea that ever deluded youth, that it is but a trifling, if not a becoming, lapse to be unchaste.

Jefferson, who had the happy art of getting the good, and letting alone the evil, of whatever he encountered on his way through life, was strongly drawn to this Marquis de Chastellux, a man of mature age, of some note in literature, a member of the Academy, and full of the peculiar spirit of his class and time. Jefferson had invited him to visit Monticello. On an afternoon in the first week of May, 1782, behold the Marquis and his three friends — a cavalcade of four gentlemen, six mounted servants, and a led horse-winding up the Little Mount, and coming in sight of the "rather elegant," unfinished Italian villa on its summit. I am afraid Mrs. Jefferson saw this brave company

dismount with some dismay, for she was not in a condition to entertain strangers. They, however, were well pleased to see a bit of Europe in those western wilds. "Mr. Jefferson," wrote the Marquis, "is the first American who has consulted the fine arts to know how he should shelter himself from the weather"; which was a sweeping statement, though not far from the truth. Upon entering, he met the master of the house; "a man not yet forty, tall, and with a mild and pleasing countenance"; "an American, who, without ever having quitted his own country, is at once a musician, skilled in drawing, a geometrician, an astronomer, a natural philosopher, legislator, and statesman"; "a philosopher in voluntary retirement from the world and public business," because "the minds of his countrymen are not yet in a condition either to bear the light or to suffer contradiction"; blessed with "a mild and amiable wife, and charming children of whose education he himself takes charge." Mr. Jefferson, he adds, received his invited guest without any show of cordiality, even with something like coldness; but before they had conversed two hours, they were as intimate as if they had passed their whole lives together. During four days the joy of their intercourse never lessened; for their conversation, "always varied and interesting, was supported by that sweet satisfaction experienced by two persons, who, in communicating their sentiments and opinions, are invariably in unison, and who understand one another at the first hint."

It so chanced that the Frenchman was a lover of Ossian. "I recollect with pleasure," he tells us, "that, as we were conversing one evening over a bowl of punch, after Mrs. Jefferson had retired, our conversation turned on the poems of Ossian. It was a spark of electricity which passed rapidly from one to the other. We recollected the passages in those sublime poems which had particularly struck us, and entertained with them my fel