the jilted lover. From that time he shrank from the society of all women, and finally came over to Virginia to hide his hurt in the Western forests.

Spite of such traditions of melancholy, the actual career of most of the people of those times forms a curious contrast to the ideals of their poetry and fiction. With scarcely an exception, they survived their unsuccessful love affairs, and lived in prosperous serenity with others than the first rulers of their hearts.

There is Jefferson, for instance. Almost the first letter in his published correspondence is devoted to a confession of his tender passion for a young lady dwelling in the town of Williamsburg. Yet her name is not the one that stands next his own on the marriage register. This first love of his was a Miss ’Becca Burwell. We chance upon the young collegian’s secret as we open his letter to John Page, written on Christmas day, 1762. He begins jocularly enough, yet only half in fun after all: “I am sure if there is such a thing as a Devil in this world, he must have been here last night, and have had some hand in contriving what happened to me. Do you think the cursed rats (at his instigation, I suppose) did not eat up my pocket-book, which was in my pocket, within a foot of my head? And not contented with plenty for the present, they carried away my jemmy-worked silk garters and half a dozen new minuets I had just got.” “Tell Miss Alice Corbin,” he adds, “that I verily believe the rats knew I was to win a pair of garters from her, or they never would have been so cruel as to carry mine away.”

Christmas day, indeed, found him in sorry case. These losses he could have borne, but worse remained to tell: “You know it rained last night, or if you do not know it, I am sure I do. When I went to bed I laid my watch in the usual place; and going to take her up after I arose this morning, I found her in the same place, ’tis true, but—quantum mutatus ab illo—all afloat in water, let in at a leak in the roof of the house, and as silent and still as the rats that had eat my pocket-book. Now, you know, if chance had had anything to do in this matter, there were a thousand other spots where it might have chanced to leak as well as this one, which was perpendicularly over my watch. But, I’ll tell you, it’s my opinion that the Devil came and bored the hole over it on purpose.” It was not the injury to his timepiece which drew forth these violent, half-real, half-jesting objurgations; no, there was a sentimental reason behind. The water had soaked a watch-paper and a picture, so that when he attempted to remove them, he says: “My cursed fingers gave them such a rent as I fear I shall never get over. I would have cried bitterly, but that I thought it beneath the dignity of a man!” The mystery of the original of the picture and the maker of the watch-paper is soon explained, for a page or two further on, he trusts that Miss ’Becca Burwell will give him another watch-paper of her own cutting, which he promises to esteem much more, though it were a plain round one, than the nicest in the world cut by other hands. “However,” he adds, “I am afraid she would think this presumption, after my suffering the other to get spoiled.”

A very real and tumultuous passion this of young Tom Jefferson’s! Every letter he writes to his friend teems with reference to her. Now she is R. B.; again Belinda; and again, with that deep secrecy of dog Latin so dear to the collegian, she figures as Campana in die (bell in day); or, still more mysteriously, as Adnileb, written in Greek that the vulgar world may not pry into the sacred secret. Oh, youth, youth, how like is the nineteenth century to the eighteenth, and that to its preceding, till we reach the courtship of Adam and Eve!

In October, ’63, he writes to his old confidant: “In the most melancholy fit that ever any poor soul was, I sit down to write you. Last night, as merry as agreeable company and dancing with Belinda in the Apollo could make me, I never could have thought the succeeding sun could have seen me so wretched as I now am!... I was prepared to say a great deal. I had dressed up in my own mind such thoughts as occurred to me in as moving a language as I knew how, and expected to have performed in a tolerably creditable manner. But, good God! when I had an opportunity of venting them, a few broken sentences, uttered in great disorder and interrupted with pauses of uncommon length, were the too visible marks of my strange confusion.” The framer of the Declaration of Independence, whose eloquence startled the world, found himself tongue-tied and stammering in a declaration of love to a provincial maiden.

At twenty-nine or thirty Jefferson had recovered enough to go a-courting again, to Mistress Martha Skelton, a young and childless widow, of such great beauty that many rivals contested with him the honor of winning her hand. The story goes that two of these rivals met one evening in Mrs. Skelton’s drawing-room. While waiting for her to enter, they heard her singing in an adjoining room, to the accompaniment of Jefferson’s violin. The love-song was so expressively executed that the admirers perceived that their doom was sealed, and, picking up their cocked hats, they stole out without waiting for the lady.

If Jefferson in his younger days was soft-hearted toward the gentler sex, his susceptibility was as nothing compared to Washington’s. The sentimental biography of that great man would be more entertaining than the story of his battles, or his triumphs of government. There are evidences in his own handwriting that, before he was fifteen years old, he had conceived a passion for a fair unknown beauty, so serious as to disturb his otherwise well-regulated mind, and make him seriously unhappy. His sentimental poems written at that age, are neither better nor worse than the productions of most boys of fifteen. One of them hints that bashfulness has prevented his divulging his passion:

“Ah, woe is me, that I should love and conceal!
Long have I wished and never dare reveal.”

At the mature age of sixteen, he writes to his “dear friend Robin”: “my residence is at present at his Lordship’s, where I might, was my heart disengaged, pass my time very pleasantly, as there’s a very agreeable young lady lives in the same house; but as that’s only adding fuel to the fire, it makes me the more uneasy; for by often and unavoidably (!) being in company with her, revives my former passion for your Lowland Beauty; whereas, was I to live more retired from young women, I might in some measure alleviate my sorrows by burying that chaste and troublesome passion in the grave of oblivion.” This “chaste and troublesome passion” had subsided enough, when he went as a young officer to New York in all the gorgeousness of uniform and trappings, to enable him to fall in love with Miss Mary Phillipse, whom he met at the house of her sister, Mrs. Beverly Robinson. She was gay, she was rich, she was beautiful, and Washington might have made her the offer of his heart and hand; but suddenly an express from Winchester brought word to New York of a French and Indian raid, and young Washington hastened to rejoin his command, leaving the capture of the lady to Captain Morris. Three years later we find him married to the Widow Custis, with two children and a fortune of fifteen thousand pounds sterling. Shortly after, he writes of himself from Mount Vernon, temperately enough, as “fixed in this seat with an agreeable partner for life,” and we hear no more of amatory verses in honor of his Lowland Beauty, or flirtations with fashionable young dames in