Page:Henry Adams' History of the United States Vol. 1.djvu/144

1800. manners." Manners were not all their charm; for the Virginians at the close of the eighteenth century were inferior to no class of Americans in the sort of education then supposed to make refinement. The Duc de Liancourt bore witness:—


 * "In spite of the Virginian love for dissipation, the taste for reading is commoner there among men of the first class than in any other part of America; but the popu­lace is perhaps more ignorant there than elsewhere."

Those whom Liancourt called "men of the first class" were equal to any standard of excellence known to history. Their range was narrow, but within it they were supreme. The traditions of high breeding were still maintained, and a small England, much as it existed in the time of the Commonwealth, was perpetuated in the Virginia of 1800. Social position was a birthright, not merely of the well born, but of the highly gifted. Nearly all the great lawyers of Virginia were of the same social stock as in New England,—poor and gifted men, welcomed into a landed aristocracy simple in tastes and genial in tem­per. Chief-Justice Marshall was such a man, com­manding respect and regard wherever he was seen,—­perhaps most of all from New Englanders, who were least familiar with the type. George Mason was an ideal republican,—a character as strong in its way as Washington or Marshall. George Wythe the Chancellor stood in the same universal esteem; and even his young clerk Henry Clay, "the mill-boy of