From what has been already stated, it will be seen how little education had to do with the formation of this great man’s mind.  He was indeed a mere child of nature, and nature seems to have been too proud and too jealous of her work, to permit it to be touched by the hand of art.  She gave him Shakespeare’s genius, and bade him, like Shakespeare, to depend on that alone.  Let not the youthful reader, however, deduce from the example of Mr. Henry, an argument in favor of indolence, and the contempt of study.  Let him remember that the powers which surmounted the disadvantage of those early habits, were such as very rarely appear upon this earth.  Let him remember, too, how long the genius even of Mr. Henry was kept down, and hidden from the public view, by the sorcery of those pernicious habits; through what years of poverty and wretchedness they doomed him to struggle; and let him remember, that at length, when in the zenith of his glory.  Mr. Henry himself, had frequent occasions to deplore the consequences of his early neglect of literature, and to bewail the ghosts of his departed hours.

* * * * *

From “Eulogium on Adams and Jefferson.”

=_176._= JEFFERSON’S SEAT AT MONTICELLO.

Approaching the house on the east, the visitor instinctively paused, to cast around one thrilling glance at this magnificent panorama, and then passed to the vestibule, where, if he had not been previously informed, he would immediately perceive that he was entering the house of no common man.  In the spacious and lofty hall which opens before him, he marks no tawdry and unmeaning ornaments, but before, on the right, on the left, all around, the eye is struck and gratified with objects of science and taste, so classed and arranged as to produce their finest effect.  On one side, specimens of sculpture set out in such order as to exhibit ... the historical progress of that art, from the first rude attempts of the aborigines of our country up to that exquisite and finished bust of the great patriot himself, from the master-hand of Ceracchi.  On the other side, the visitor sees displayed a vast collection of specimens of Indian art—­their paintings, weapons, ornaments, and manufactures; on another, an array of the fossil productions of our country, mineral and animal, the polished remains of those colossal monsters that once trod our forests, and are no more; and a variegated display of the branching honors of those “monarchs of the waste,” that still people the wilds of the American continent.

From this hall he was ushered into a noble saloon, from which the glorious landscape of the west again bursts upon his view, and which within is hung thick around with the finest productions of the pencil—­historical paintings of the most striking subjects from all countries and all ages, the portraits of distinguished men and patriots both of Europe and America, and medallions and engravings in endless profusion.