thought.  He was always familiar with the details of legislation.  The majority of the members of a legislature can seldom know much about its business.  Those questions which excite popular attention and become party tests are inquired into; but most matters attract no attention and are not party tests.  Only a few men of great industry and rare powers are familiar with these.  In the British House of Commons, it is said, there are not more than thirty or forty such members.  In either branch of our Congress the proportion is no larger.  It is a great power to know that which others find it necessary to know; and if to this information one adds good judgment and a persuasive intellect, his influence will be almost unbounded.  Young as he was, no one could approach Jefferson without seeing that he had read and thought much.  While most of his comrades in Virginia had been wasting their youth in horse-racing and cock-fighting, he had been an enthusiastic student of books and Nature.  Upon all subjects likely to excite inquiry his knowledge was full and precise, and his opinions those of a sagacious and philosophic mind.  His manners were attractive; he never engaged in dispute; he expressed himself freely to those who sought his society for information or an intelligent comparison of opinion; but his lips were closed in the presence of a disputant.  The patience with which he listened to others, and the modest candor with which he expressed himself, usually disarmed the contentions; when they did not, he went no farther.  If his views were false, he did not wish them to prevail; if they were true, he felt certain that sooner or later they would prevail.  A temperament like this might have placed a less firm man under the imputation of disingenuousness; but such an imputation could not rest upon him.  No one was in doubt as to his opinions.  He generally anticipated inquiry, and selected his ground before others saw that action would be necessary.  There were capable lawyers and men of wide experience in our Revolutionary legislatures, but there was no one whose influence was more powerful and felt upon a greater variety of subjects than that of Jefferson.

He might, however, have possessed all of these characteristics, and enjoyed the consideration among his fellow-legislators which they confer, without being well known to the public, if he had not united to them the ability to write elegant and forcible English.  The circumstances of the time made literary talents unusually valuable.  The daily press has driven the essayist out of the political field.  But for several generations elaborate disquisitions upon politics had been usual in England; in this regard pamphlets then occupied the place of our newspapers.  Bolingbroke, Swift, Johnson, and Burke, all the serious and some of the gay writers, acquired repute by this kind of effort.  Neither were the speeches of leading men circulated then as at present.  At the time of the Revolution,