the living. As far as the tribute to John Adams was involved, the oratory of Webster -- -greatest orator of his day-was not so much a commemoration as an apotheosis. "Alas!" he said, quoting his friend Josiah Quincy-who on the 4th of July delivered in the same hall the anniversary address" when we were all hoping that the sound of a nation's joy rushing from our cities might yet break the silence of his aged ear, and that the rising blessings of grateful millions might yet visit with glad light his decaying vision, his vision was at that very moment closing for ever. Alas! continued Mr Webster, "the silence which was then settling on that aged ear was an everlasting silence! For lo! in the very moment of our festivities, his freed spirit ascended to God who gave it. Human aid and human solace terminated at the grave, or we would gladly have borne him upwards on a nation's outspread hands, accompanied with the blessings and the prayers of millions." Posterity-out of the boundaries of New England-has not wholly ratified the verdict, or placed the name and services of John Adams on the high pedestal where Mr Webster would have been content that they should remain for ever. All admit his abilities, his honesty, and his patriotism; but it is only Massachusetts that ranks him among the demi-gods. As a young man he was among the greatest, if he were not the very greatest, of his country. As a man of middle age he did not attain the high standard which his youth led his contemporaries to predict. He was a respectable, a useful, a zealous public servant, and an average diplomatist, with small opportunities of distinction, which he made the most of. In later life, and when he had attained the highest summit of his ambition, and wielded, as far as a President could wield, the destinies of his country, he offended the party by whose suffrages he was elected, and never conciliated in any appreciable degree the party that had opposed him. The adopted of Federalism, he threw back the cause of the Federalists for sixty years. "Whom the gods love, die young," said the ancients. haps, and most probably, if John Adams had died immediately after the Declaration of Independence, his name, next to that of Washington, might have stood highest and brightest in the long muster-roll of American worthies. Per 208 THOMAS JEFFERSON. THE name of Thomas Jefferson stands clear and bold on the page of American history: a man of strong convictions and unflinching courage; ever anxious to discover the right, and ever fearless to uphold it. The rebellion of the Colonies was essentially democratic in its origin, its progress, and its results; but no true democrat arose to shape the future Republic upon the broad principles of popular liberty, until Jefferson put the impress of his genius upon the Declaration of Independence. When Washington and the earlier patriots only sought for a redress of grievances, and never dreamed of severing the connection of the Colonies with the Crown, Jefferson saw that the only effectual remedy was independence, and the only possible form of Government in the New World Republicanism. He held this faith when he stood alone; he held it until all America agreed with him. Washington lost heart at times-Jefferson never. The soldier, in the solitude of his tent on the field, foiled or impeded at every turn by the apathy, discontent, or incapacity of the men with whom he had to deal, more than once despaired of the fortunes of his country; the philosopher, in the silence and seclusion of his study, never allowed the possibility of failure to enter into his thought. The soldier was an aristocrat, and had small faith in the multitude; the philosopher, though born an aristocrat, was a man of the people, and never doubted either the justice of their cause or the certainty of its triumph. Thomas Jefferson was born at Shadwell, in the county of Albemarle in Virginia, on the 2d of April 1743, the third child, but eldest son, of Peter Jefferson-a planter of fair estate-by his wife, Jane, a daughter of John Randolph, also a planter. The Jefferson family were among the earliest settlers in the Old Dominion, arriving from the foot of Snowdon in Wales, at a time when the whole population of Virginia, exclusive of the Indians, scarcely exceeded 600. They were proud of their descent from the ancient Britons, and no less proud of the Keltic element in their blood, which they strengthened by a Scottish intermarriage. Peter Jefferson is described as having been a man of gigantic stature and herculean strength, rough in his manners and simple in his appearance, as a backwoodsman should be; but a scholar and a gentleman, well read in the contemporary English literature of Pope, Swift, and Addison, and still more familiar with Shakespeare and the early poets and dramatists. He was a "muscular Christian" when the phrase was uninvented, and thought that a man owed as much duty in this world to that divine structure the body, as to the diviner essence the soul. To maintain the strong mind in the strong body was his constant aim as regarded himself; and with his force of character it was not likely that he would pursue, or allow to be pursued, a different course in the education of his son. Under his father's direction, and inspired by his example and companionship, the young Jefferson was taught to ride, to row, to swim, to hunt, and to shoot; and in the evenings, when the family assembled in the common room, he was instructed in arithmetic, mathematics, and music, and taught to keep accounts. He wrote a clear and beautiful hand, and acquired those habits of regularity and system for which the son afterwards became more noted than his father. The elder Jefferson, |