lly
studying Magna Charta and Bracton.

He found time also for riding, for music, and dancing; and in his
twentieth year he became enamored of Miss Rebecca Burwell, a Williamsburg
belle more distinguished, tradition reports, for beauty than for
cleverness. But Jefferson was not yet in a position to marry,--he even
contemplated a foreign tour; and the girl, somewhat abruptly, married
another lover. The wound seems not to have been a deep one. Jefferson, in
fact, though he found his chief happiness in family affection, and though
capable of strong and lasting attachments, was not the man for a romantic
passion. He was a philosopher of the reasonable, eighteenth-century type.
No one was more kind and just in the treatment of his slaves, but he did
not free them, as George Wythe, perhaps foolishly, did; and he was even
cautious about promulgating his views as to the folly and wickedness of
slavery, though he did his best to promote its abolition by legislative
measures. There was not in Jefferson the material for a martyr or a Don
Quixote; but that was Nature's fault, not his. It may be said of every
particular man that there is a certain depth to which he cannot sink, and
there is a certain height to which he cannot rise. Within the intermediate
zone there is ample exercise for free-will; and no man struggled harder
than Jefferson to fulfill all the obligations which, as he conceived, were
laid upon him.

III

MONTICELLO AND ITS HOUSEHOLD

In April, 1764, Jefferson came of age, and his first public act was a
characteristic one. For the benefit of the neighborhood, he procured the
passage of a statute to authorize the dredging of the Rivanna River upon
which his own estate bordered in part. He then by private subscriptions
raised a sum sufficient for carrying out this purpose; and in a short time
the stream, upon which before a bark canoe would hardly have floated, was
made available for the transportation of farm produce to the James River,
and thence to the sea.

In 1766, he made a journey to Philadelphia, in order to be inoculated for
smallpox, traveling in a light gig drawn by a high-spirited horse, and
narrowly escaping death by drowning in one of the numerous rivers which
had to be forded between Charlottesville and Philadelphia. In the
following year, about the time of his twenty-fourth birthday, he was
admitted to the bar, and entered almost