in the English State Paper Office, were,
so far as they related to the Madisons, incomplete and worthless. The
family was not, apparently, "coeval with the foundation of the Colony,"
and did not arrive "among the earliest of the emigrants in the New
World." That distinction cannot be claimed for James Madison, nor is
there any reason for supposing that he believed it could be. He seemed
quite content with the knowledge that so far back as his
great-grandfather his ancestors had been respectable people, "in
independent and comfortable circumstances."

Of his own generation there were seven children, of whom James was the
eldest, and alone became of any note, except that the rest were
reputable and contented people in their stations of life. A hundred
years ago the Arcadian Virginia, for which Governor Berkeley had
thanked God so devoutly,--when there was not a free school nor a press
in the province,--had passed away. The elder Madison resolved, so Mr.
Rives tells us, that his children should have advantages of education
which had not been within his own reach, and that they should all enjoy
them equally. James was sent to a school where he could at least begin
the studies which should fit him to enter college. Of the master of that
school we know nothing except that he was a Scotchman, of the name of
Donald Robertson, and that many years afterward, when his son was an
applicant for office to Madison, then secretary of state, the pupil
gratefully remembered his old master, and indorsed upon the application
that "the writer is son of Donald Robertson, the learned Teacher in King
and Queen County, Virginia."

The preparatory studies for college were finished at home under the
clergyman of the parish, the Rev. Thomas Martin, who was a member of Mr.
Madison's family, perhaps as a private tutor, perhaps as a boarder. It
is quite likely that it was by the advice of this gentleman--who was
from New Jersey--that the lad was sent to Princeton instead of to
William and Mary College in Virginia. At Princeton, at any rate, he
entered at the age of eighteen, in 1769; or, to borrow Mr. Rives's
eloquent statement of the fact, "the young Virginian, invested with the
_toga virilis_ of anticipated manhood, we now see launched on that
disciplinary career which is to form him for the future struggles of
life."

One of his biographers says that he shortened his collegiate term by
taking in one year the studies of the junior and senior yea