I have given up newspapers in
exchange for Tacitus and Thucydides, for Newton and Euclid, and I
find myself much the happier. Sometimes, indeed, I look back to former
occurrences, in remembrance of our old friends and fellow-laborers,
who have fallen before us. Of the signers of the Declaration of
Independence, I see now living not more than half a dozen on your side
of the Potomac, and on this side, myself alone. You and I have
been wonderfully spared, and myself with remarkable health, and a
considerable activity of body and mind. I am on horseback three or four
hours of every day; visit three or four times a year a possession I have
ninety miles distant, performing the winter journey on horseback. I walk
little, however, a single mile being too much for me; and I live in the
midst of my grandchildren, one of whom has lately promoted me to be a
great-grandfather. I have heard with pleasure that you also retain good
health, and a greater power of exercise in walking than I do. But I
would rather have heard this from yourself, and that, writing a letter
like mine, full of egotisms, and of details of your health, your habits,
occupations, and enjoyments, I should have the pleasure of knowing, that
in the race of life, you do not keep, in its physical decline, the
same distance ahead of me, which you have done in political honors and
achievements. No circumstances have lessened the interest I feel in
these particulars respecting yourself; none have suspended for one
moment my sincere esteem for you, and I now salute you with unchanged
affection and respect.

Th: Jefferson.

LETTER C.--TO JOHN ADAMS, April 20, 1812

TO JOHN ADAMS.

Monticello, April 20, 1812.

Dear Sir,

I have it now in my power to send you a piece of homespun in return for
that I received from you. Not of the fine texture, or delicate character
of yours, or, to drop our metaphor, not filled as that was with that
display of imagination which constitutes excellence in Belles Lettres,
but a mere sober, dry, and formal piece of logic. _Ornari res ipsa
negat_. Yet you may have enough left of your old taste for law reading,
to cast an eye over some of the questions it discusses. At any rate,
accept it as the offering of esteem and friendship.

You wish to know something of the Richmond and Wabash prophets. Of
Nimrod Hews I never before heard. Christopher Macpherson I have known
for twenty years. He is a man of color, brought up as a book-keepe