All the early life of this youth was wandering and desultory.  At fourteen, we find him at Princeton College in New Jersey, where, we are told, he fought a duel, exchanged shots twice with his adversary, and put a ball into his body which he carried all his life.  By this time, too, the precocious and ungovernable boy had become, as he flattered himself, a complete atheist.  One of his favorite amusements at Princeton was to burlesque the precise and perhaps ungraceful Presbyterians of the place.  The library of his Virginian home, it appears, was furnished with a great supply of what the French mildly call 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