recreation for the hours of respite from the cares of the day, and lasts us through life. The taste of this country, too, calls for this accomplishment more strongly than for either of the others.

I need say nothing of household economy, in which the mothers of our country are generally skilled, and generally careful to instruct their daughters. We all know its value, and that diligence and dexterity in all its processes are inestimable treasures. The order and economy of a house are as honorable to the mistress as those of the farm to the master, and if either be neglected, ruin follows, and children destitute of the means of living.

This, sir, is offered as a summary sketch on a subject on which I have not thought much. It probably contains nothing but what has already occurred to yourself, and claims your acceptance on no other ground than as a testimony of my respect for your wishes, and of my great esteem and respect."

When the above list of approved novels for young ladies' perusal is examined, the modern reader will not be likely to forget that Waverley, Guy Mannering, the Antiquary, and Old Mortality were then before the world. Rob Roy and the Heart of Mid Lothian appeared in 1818. It is easy to see why such writers as Radcliffe and Godwin-to say nothing of an earlier English school of able, but immoral, or at least indelicate authors-were excluded from the catalogue. But Scott's works are generally thought to exhibit vastly more perfection as novels, than any Mr. Jefferson named; and surely he did not sigh for higher standards of character, more beautiful delineations of every virtue, more certain visitations of the avenging Nemesis to the bosom of guilt, more terrible retributions for crime, than are uniformly interwoven into the plot and moral of the "Waverley Novels."

This relegation of Scott must have been intentional. Mr. Jefferson had read none of his fictions, because he would not read them. But, at the entreaties of grand-daughters, he had listened to occasional passages or pages from several of them. They were not to his taste. In prose as in poetry, he did not relish the romantic school. He detested the political civilization of the middle ages, and especially the feudal system, as cordially as Scott admired them. He as warmly sympathized with common humanity as Scott did with kings and nobles. In short, he was as thorough a radical in heart and grain as the great novelist was a tory. He thought, therefore, that the pictures of social and political civilization drawn by the latter had an untruthful, if not dangerous coloring. But the issue taken with the delineator was rather ludicrous than serious. His taste in regard to the romantic was similar to that of Cervantes-per

haps had been fashioned on it. The Bois-Guilberts and the Front de Bœufs, to him were all cousin-germans of Don Quixote. It is recollected by members of his family, that he could not endure the character of the stately and chivalrous Norman race of men-always speaking of them as "tyrants and robbers." His partiality for the Saxon element in English character, laws and manners, was strong and often avowed.

Jefferson expressed the following views in regard to the people of the western American States, in a letter to Mr. Adams (May 17th, 1818):

"They are freer from prejudices than we are, and bolder in grasping at truth. The time is not distant, though neither you nor I shall see it, when we shall be but a secondary people to them. Our greediness for wealth, and fantastical expense have degraded, and will degrade, the minds of our maritime citizens. These are the peculiar vices of commerce."

In a letter to Robert Walsh (Dec. 4th), he paid a beautiful tribute to the character of Franklin, and inclosed that paper of anecdotes concerning him which is now familiar to the reading public.'

Here are the reform theories of a temperate man on the subject of temperance, forty years ago, in a letter to M. de Neuville:

"I rejoice, as a moralist, at the prospect of a reduction of the duties on wine, by our National Legislature. It is an error to view a tax on that liquor as merely a tax on the rich. It is a prohibition of its use to the middling class of our citizens, and a condemnation of them to the poison of whisky, which is desolating their houses. No nation is drunken where wine is cheap; and none sober, where the dearness of wine substitutes ardent spirits as the common beverage. It is, in truth, the only antidote to the bane of whisky. Fix but the duty at the rate of other merchandise, and we can drink wine here as cheap as we do grog; and who will not prefer it? Its extended use will carry health and comfort to a much enlarged circle. Every one in easy circumstances (as the bulk of our citizens are) will prefer it to the poison to which they are now driven by their government. And the treasury itself will find that a penny apiece from a dozen, is more than a groat from a single one. This reformation, however, will require time. Our merchants know nothing of the

While he distinctly admitted that it was "to Mr. Adams's perseverance alone" he had always understood that our country was indebted for the reservation of the fisheries, in the first treaty of peace with England, he said he had never heard on any authority worthy of notice," that Franklin would have waived the formal recognition of our independence; and he declared on his own knowledge, that the charge against him of subserviency to France "had not a shadow of foundation." He said, Franklin possessed the confidence of the French Government to such a degree "that it might be truly said, that they were more under his influence than he under theirs." He attributed the misrepresentations of Franklin's conduct principally to Dr. Arthur Lee.—(See vol. i. p. 156.)

VOL. III.-29

infinite variety of cheap and good wines to be had in Europe; and particularly in France, in Italy, and the Græcian Islands."

He wrote to his old friend, Mr. Macon, Jan. 12th, 1819:

"I read no newspaper now but Ritchie's, and in that chiefly the advertisements, for they contain the only truths to be relied on in a newspaper. I feel a much greater interest in knowing what has passed two or three thousand years ago, than in what is now passing. I read nothing, therefore, but of the heroes of Troy, of the wars of Lacedæmon and Athens, of Pompey and Cæsar, and of Augustus too, the Bonaparte and parricide scoundrel of that day. I have had, and still have, such entire confidence in the late and present Presidents, that I willingly put both soul and body into their pockets."

The following letter gives too minute an account of Mr. Jefferson's physical habits and condition, and of his habits in some other particulars, not to be quoted entire.

TO DOCTOR VINE UTLEY.

MONTICELLO, March 21, 1819.

SIR,-Your letter of February the 18th came to hand on the 1st instant: and the request of the history of my physical habits would have puzzled me not a little, had it not been for the model with which you accompanied it, of Dr. Rush's answer to a similar inquiry. I live so much like other people, that I might refer to ordinary life as the history of my own. Like my friend the Doctor, I have lived temperately, eating little animal food, and that not as an aliment, so much as a condiment for the vegetables, which constitute my principal diet. I double, however, the Doctor's glass and a half of wine, and even treble it with a friend; but halve its effects by drinking the weak wines only. The ardent wines I cannot drink, nor do I use ardent spirits in any form. Malt liquors and cider are my table drinks, and my breakfast, like that also of my friend, is of tea and coffee. I have been blest with organs of digestion which accept and concoct, without ever murmuring, whatever the palate chooses to consign to them, and I have not yet lost a tooth by age. I was a hard student until I entered on the business of life, the duties of which leave no idle time to those disposed to fulfill them; and now, retired, and at the age of seventy-six, I am again a hard student. Indeed, my fondness for reading and study revolts me from the drudgery of letter writing. And a stiff wrist, the consequence of an early dislocation, makes writing both slow and painful. I am not so regular in my sleep as the Doctor says he was, devoting to it from five to eight hours, according as my company or the book I am reading interests me; and I never go to bed without an hour, or half an hour's previous reading of something moral, whereon to ruminate in the intervals of sleep. But whether I retire to bed early or late, I rise with the sun. I use spectacles at night, but not necessarily in the day, unless in reading small print. My hearing is distinct in particular conversation, but confused when several voices cross each other, which unfits me for the society of the table. I have been more fortunate than my friend in the article of health. So free from catarrhs that I have not had one (in the breast, I mean) on an average of eight or ten years through life. I ascribe this exemption partly to the

habit of bathing my feet in cold water every morning, for sixty years past. A fever of more than twenty-four hours I have not had above two or three times in my life. A periodical headache has afflicted me occasionally, once, perhaps, in six or eight years, for two or three weeks at a time, which seems now to have left me; and, except on a late occasion of indisposition, I enjoy good health; too feeble, indeed, to walk much, but riding without fatigue six or eight miles a day, and sometimes thirty or forty. I may end these egotisms, therefore, as I began, by saying that my life has been so much like that of other people, that I might say with Horace, to every one "nomine mutato, narratur fabula de te." I must not end, however, without due thanks for the kind sentiments of regard you are so good as to express towards myself; and with my acknowledgments for these, be pleased to accept the assurances of my respect and esteem.

The book oftenest chosen for reading for an hour or half an hour before going to bed was a collection of extracts from the Bible. During the year 1803, while Mr. Jefferson was in Washington, "overwhelmed with other business," he spent two or three nights" after getting through the evening task of reading the letters and papers of the day," in cutting such passages from the evangelists as he believed emanated directly from the lips of the Saviour, and he arranged them in an octavo volume of forty-six pages. This selection is thus described by him to his Revolutionary friend, Charles Thompson, January 9th, 1816:"

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1

2

"I, too, have made a wee-little book from the same materials, which I call the Philosophy of Jesus; it is a paradigma of his doctrines, made by cutting the texts out of the book, and arranging them on the pages of a blank book, in a certain order of time or subject. A more beautiful or precious morsel of ethics I have never seen; it is a document in proof that I am a real Christian, that is to say, a disciple of the doctrines of Jesus, very different from the Platonists, who call me infidel and themselves Christians and preachers of the Gospel, while they draw all their characteristic dogmas from what its author never said nor saw. They have compounded from the heathen mysteries a system beyond the comprehension of man, of which the great reformer of the vicious ethics and deism of the Jews were he to return on earth, would not recognize one feature. If I had time I would add to my little book the Greek, Latin, and French texts, in columns side by side."

It was in the winter of 1816-17, it is believed, that Mr. Jefferson carried out the design last expressed. In a handsome morocco-bound volume, labelled on the back, "Morals of Jesus," he placed the parallel texts in four languages. The first collec

1 See letter to Mr. Short, October 31st, 1819; and to Mr.Vanderkemp, April 25th, 1816.

2 The letter was in acknowledgment of a presentation by Mr. Thompson of his Harmony of the Four Gospels.

The italics in this letter were underscored in the original.

1

tion of English texts, mentioned in the letter to Thompson, is not preserved in Mr. Jefferson's family, but his grandson, Mr. George Wythe Randolph, has obtained for us a list of its contents. That, in different languages, is in the possession of his oldest grandson, Colonel Thomas Jefferson Randolph. A full citation of the passages in both volumes will be given in the Appendix.' It is remarkable that neither of these collections were known to Mr. Jefferson's grandchildren until after his death. They then learned from a letter addressed to a friend that he was in the habit of reading nightly from them before going to bed.'

In a reply to Mr. Spafford, who had requested materials for writing his life, Mr. Jefferson stated (May 11th, 1819), that he had kept no narrative of the public transactions in which he had borne a part with a view to history-that a life of constant action had left him no time for recording-that he had always been thinking of what was next to be done-and that what was done was then dismissed and obliterated from memory. He added:

Numerous and able coadjutors have participated in these efforts, and merit equal notice. My life, in fact, has been so much like that of others, that their history is my history, with a mere difference of feature."

After mentioning a few authorities, he continued:

"These publications furnish all the details of facts and dates which can interest anybody, and more than I could now furnish myself from a decayed memory, or any notes I retain. While, therefore, I feel just acknowledgments for the partial selection of a subject for your employment, I am persuaded you will perceive there is too little new and worthy of public notice to devote to it a time which may be so much more usefully employed."

On the 9th of July he made the memorable answer to John Adams in regard to the "Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence," which has drawn out so much discussion, and which has already been noticed in this work.'

This is sometimes mentioned as Mr. Jefferson's "Collection for the Indians," it being understood that he conferred with friends on the expediency of having it published in the different Indian dialects as the most appropriate book for the Indians to be instructed to read in.

2 See APPENDIX No. 30.

This is stated in a letter to us from Colonel Randolph, which will appear in this Folume. See APPENDIX No. 2.