The legislative patriots were a distinct class from the patriots of the
camp, and never laid aside the gown for the sword. It was very
different in the great civil war of England, where the leading minds of
the age, when argument had done its office, or left it undone, put on
their steel breastplates and appeared as leaders in the field. Educated
young men, members of the old colonial families,--gentlemen, as John
Adams terms them,--seem not to have sought employment in the
Revolutionary army, in such numbers as night have been expected.
Respectable as the officers generally were, and great as were the
abilities sometimes elicited, the intellect and cultivation of the
country was inadequately represented in them, as a body.
Turning another page, we find the frank of a letter from Henry Laurens,
President of Congress,--him whose destiny it was, like so many noblemen
of old, to pass beneath the Traitor's Gate of the Tower of London,--him
whose chivalrous son sacrificed as brilliant a future as any young
American could have looked forward to, in an obscure skirmish.
Likewise, we have the address of a letter to Messrs. Leroy and Bayard,
in the handwriting of Jefferson; too slender a material to serve as a
talisman for summoning up the writer; a most unsatisfactory fragment,
affecting us like a glimpse of the retreating form of the sage of
Monticello, turning the distant corner of a street.
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