She was remiss in keeping her journal; remiss, too, in writing to her father, though he reminded her that he never let one of her letters remain unanswered a day.  He reproved her sharply.  “What!” said he,

“can neither affection nor civility induce you to devote to me the small portion of time which I have required?  Are authority and compulsion then the only engines by which you can be moved?  For shame, Theo.  Do not give me reason to think so ill of you.”

She reformed.  In her twelfth year, her father wrote:  “Io triumphe! there is not a word misspelled either in your journal or letter, which cannot be said of one you ever wrote before.”  And again: 

“When you want punctuality in your letters, I am sure you want it in everything; for you will constantly observe that you have the most leisure when you do the most business.  Negligence of one’s duty produces a self-dissatisfaction which unfits the mind for everything, and ennui and peevishness are the never-failing consequence.”

His letters abound in sound advice.  There is scarcely a passage in them which the most scrupulous and considerate parent could disapprove.  Theodosia heeded well his instructions.  She became nearly all that his heart or his pride desired.

During the later years of her childhood, her mother was grievously afflicted with a cancer, which caused her death in 1794, before Theodosia had completed her twelfth year.  From that time, such was the precocity of her character, that she became the mistress of her father’s house and the companion of his leisure hours.  Continuing her studies, however, we find her in her sixteenth year translating French comedies, reading the Odyssey at the rate of two hundred lines a day, and about to begin the Iliad.  “The happiness of my life,” writes her father, “depends upon your exertions; for what else, for whom else, do I live?” And, later, when all the world supposed that his whole soul was absorbed in getting New York ready to vote for Jefferson and Burr, he told her that the ideas of which she was the subject that passed daily through his mind would, if committed to writing, fill an octavo volume.

Who so happy as Theodosia?  Who so fortunate?  The young ladies of New York, at the close of the last century, might have been pardoned for envying the lot of this favorite child of one who then seemed the favorite child of fortune.  Burr had been a Senator of the United States as soon as he had attained the age demanded by the Constitution.  As a lawyer he was second in ability and success to no man; in reputation, to none but Hamilton, whose services in the Cabinet of General Washington had given him great celebrity.  Aged members of the New York bar remember that Burr alone was the antagonist who could put Hamilton