l the literature of incredulity,--Helvetius, Voltaire, Rousseau,
Diderot, D'Alembert, and the rest. The boy, in his rage for knowledge,
had read vast quantities of this literature, and, of course, embraced
the theory of the writers that pushed denial farthest. For twenty-two
years, he says in one of his letters, he never entered a church. Great
pleasure it gave him to show how superior the Mahometan religion was
to the Christian, and to recite specimens of what he took delight in
styling Hebrew jargon. The Psalms of David were his special aversion.

Almost all gifted and fearless lads that have lived in Christendom
during the last hundred years have had a fit of this kind between
fifteen and twenty-five. The strength of the tendency to question the
grounds of belief must be great indeed to bear away with it a youth
like this, formed by Nature to believe. John Randolph had no more
intellectual right to be a sceptic, than he had a moral right to be a
republican. A person whose imagination is quick and warm, whose
feelings are acute, and whose intellect is wholly untrained, can find
no comfort except in belief. His scepticism is a mere freak of vanity
or self-will. Coming upon the stage of life when unbelief was
fashionable in high drawing-rooms, he became a sceptic. But Nature
will have her way with us all, and so this atheist at fifteen was an
Evangelical at forty-five.

His first political bias was equally at war with his nature. John
Randolph was wholly a tory; there was not in his whole composition one
republican atom. But coming early under the direct personal influence
of Thomas Jefferson, whose every fibre was republican, he, too, the
sympathetic tory of genius, espoused the people's cause. He was less
than twenty-two years, however, in recovering from _this_ false
tendency.

Summoned from Princeton, after only a few months' residence, by the
death of his mother, he went next to Columbia College, in the city of
New York, where for a year or two he read Greek with a tutor,
especially Demosthenes. At New York he saw the first Congress under
the new Constitution assemble, and was one of the concourse that
witnessed the scene of General Washington's taking the oath on the
balcony of the old City Hall. It seemed to this Virginia boy natural
enough that a Virginian should be at the head of the government; not
so, that a Yankee should hold the second place and preside over the
Senate. Forty years after, he recalled wit