t to go and be baptized.... He
was always a good servant afterward."

Another element that contributed to the efficiency and the high standard
of the early Virginia statesman was a good, old-fashioned classical
education. They were familiar, to use Matthew Arnold's famous expression,
"with the best that has ever been said or done." This was no small
advantage to men who were called upon to act as founders of a republic
different indeed from the republics of Greece and Rome, but still based
upon the same principles, and demanding an exercise of the same heroic
virtues. The American Revolution would never have cut quite the figure in
the world which history assigns to it, had it not been conducted with a
kind of classic dignity and decency; and to this result nobody contributed
more than Jefferson.

Such was Virginia in the eighteenth century,--at the base of society, the
slaves; next, a lower class, rough, ignorant, and somewhat brutal, but
still wholesome, and possessing the primitive virtues of courage and
truth; and at the top, the landed gentry, luxurious, proud, idle and
dissipated for the most part, and yet blossoming into a few characters of
a type so high that the world has hardly seen a better. Had he been born
in Europe, Jefferson would doubtless have devoted himself to music, or to
architecture, or to literature, or to science,--for in all these directions
his taste was nearly equally strong; but these careers being closed to him
by the circumstances of the colony, he became a lawyer, and then, under
pressure of the Revolution, a politician and statesman.

During the four years following his graduation, Jefferson spent most of
the winter months at Williamsburg, pursuing his legal and other studies,
and the rest of the year upon the family plantation, the management of
which had devolved upon him. Now, as always, he was the most industrious
of men. He lived, as Mr. Parton remarks, "with a pen in his hand." He kept
a garden book, a farm book, a weather book, a receipt book, a cash book,
and, while he practiced law, a fee book. Many of these books are still
preserved, and the entries are as legible now as when they were first
written down in Jefferson's small but clear and graceful hand,--the hand of
an artist. Jefferson, as one of his old friends once remarked, _hated_
superficial knowledge; and he dug to the roots of the common law, reading
deeply in old reports written in law French and law Latin, and especia