rce of negroes equivalent to one hundred and
eighty full field hands, he could not afford himself the luxury of a
trip to Europe until he was fifty years old. The amount of this debt
we do not know, but he says enough about it for us to infer that it
was not of very large amount in comparison with his great resources.
One hundred and eighty stalwart negroes working the best land in the
world, under a man so keen and vigilant as this last of the noble
Randolphs, and yet making scarcely any headway for a quarter of a
century!

The blood of this fine breed of men was also running low. Both the
parents of John Randolph and both of his brothers died young, and he
himself inherited weakness which early developed into disease. One of
his half-brothers died a madman. "My whole name and race," he would
say, "lie under a curse. I feel the curse clinging to me." He was a
fair, delicate child, more like a girl than a boy, and more inclined,
as a child, to the sports of girls than of boys. His mother, a fond,
tender, gentle lady, nourished his softer qualities, powerless to
govern him, and probably never attempting it. Nevertheless, he was no
girl; he was a genuine _son_ of the South. Such was the violence of
his passions, that, before he was four years old, he sometimes in a
fit of anger fell senseless upon the floor, and was restored only
after much effort. His step-father, who was an honorable man, seems
never to have attempted either to control his passions or develop his
intellect. He grew up, as many boys of Virginia did, and do,
unchecked, unguided, untrained. Turned loose in a miscellaneous
library, nearly every book he read tended to intensify his feelings or
inflame his imagination. His first book was Voltaire's Charles XII.,
and a better book for a boy has never been written. Then he fell upon
the Spectator. Before he was twelve he had read the Arabian Nights,
Orlando, Robinson Crusoe, Smollett's Works, Reynard the Fox, Don
Quixote, Gil Bias, Tom Jones, Gulliver, Shakespeare, Plutarch's Lives,
Pope's Homer, Goldsmith's Rome, Percy's Reliques, Thomson's Seasons,
Young, Gray, and Chatterton,--a gallon of sack to a penny's worth of
bread. A good steady drill in arithmetic, geography, and language
might have given his understanding a chance; but this ill-starred boy
never had a steady drill in anything. He never remained longer at any
one school than a year, and he learned at school very little that he
needed most to know. I