Here was an inviting opportunity for developing an engaging infant into that monstrous thing, a spoiled child. She was an only daughter in a family of which all the members but herself were adults, and the head of which was among the busiest of men.
But Aaron Burr, amidst all the toils of his profession, and in spite of the distractions of political strife, made the education of his daughter the darling object of his existence. Hunters tell us that pointers and hounds inherit the instinct which renders them such valuable allies in the pursuit of game; so that the offspring of a trained dog acquires the arts of the chase with very little instruction. Burr's father was one of the most zealous and skillful of schoolmasters, and from him he appears to have derived that pedagogic cast of character which led him, all his life, to take so much interest in the training of protégés. There was never a time in his whole career when he had not some youth upon his hands to whose education he was devoted. His system of training, with many excellent points, was radically defective. Its defects are sufficiently indicated when we say that It was pagan, not Christian. Plato, Socrates, Cato, and Cicero might have pronounced it good and sufficient: St. John, St. Augustine, and all the Christian host would have lamented it as fatally defective. But if Burr educated his child as though she were a Roman girl, her mother was with her during the first eleven years of her life, to supply, in some degree, what was wanting in the instructions of her father.
Burr was a stoic. He cultivated hardness. Fortitude and fidelity were his favorite virtues. The seal which he used in his correspondence with his intimate friends, and with them only, was descriptive of his character and prophetic of his destiny. It was a Rock, solitary in the midst of a tempestuous ocean, and bore the inscription, "Nee flatu nee fluctu"—neither by wind nor by wave. It was his principle to steel himself against the inevitable evils of life. If we were asked to select from his writings the sentence which contains most of his characteristic way of thinking, it would be one which he wrote in his twenty-fourth year to his future wife: "That mind is truly great which can bear with equanimity the trifling and unavoidable vexations of life, and be affected only by those which determine our substantial bliss." He utterly despised all complaining, even of the greatest calamities. He even experienced a kind of proud pleasure in enduring the fierce obloquy of his later years. One day, near the close of his life, when a friend had told him of some new scandal respecting his moral conduct, he said: "That's right, my child, tell me what they say. I like to know what the public say of me,—the great public!" Such words he would utter without the slightest bitterness, speaking of the great public as a humorous old grandfather might of a wayward, foolish, good little child.
So, at the dawn of a career which promised nothing but glory and prosperity, surrounded by all the appliances of ease and pleasure, he was solicitous to teach his child to do and to endure. He would have her accustomed to sleep alone, and to go about the house in the dark. Her breakfast was of bread and milk. He was resolute in exacting the less agreeable tasks, such as arithmetic. He insisted upon regularity of hours. Upon going away upon a journey he would leave written orders for her tutors, detailing the employments of each day; and, during his absence, a chief topic of his letters was the lessons of the children. Children,—for, that his Theodosia might have the advantage of a companion in her studies, he adopted the little Natalie, a French child, whom he reared to womanhood in his house. "The letters of our dear children," he would write,
"are a feast. To hear that they are employed, that no time is absolutely wasted, is the most flattering of anything that could be told me of them. It insures their affection, or is the best evidence of it. It insures in its consequences everything I am ambitious of in them. Endeavor to preserve regularity of hours; it conduces exceedingly to industry."
And his wife would answer:
"I really believe, my dear, that few parents can boast of children whose minds are so prone to virtue. I see the reward of our assiduity with inexpressible delight, with a gratitude few experience. My Aaron, they have grateful hearts."
Or thus: "Theo [seven years old] ciphers from five in the morning until eight, and also the same hours in the evening. This prevents our riding at those hours."
When Theodosia was ten years old, Mary Wollstonecraft's eloquent little book, "A Vindication of the Eights of Woman," fell into Burr's hands. He was so powerfully struck by it that he sat up nearly all night reading it. He showed it to all his friends. "Is it owing to ignorance or prejudice," he wrote, "that I have not yet met a single person who had discovered, or would allow the merit of this work?" The work, indeed, was fifty years in advance of the time; for it anticipated all that is rational in the opinions respecting the position and education of women which are now held by the ladies who are stigmatized as the Strong-minded, as well as by John Mill, Herbert Spencer, and other economists of the modern school. It demanded fair play for the understanding of women. It proclaimed the essential equality of the sexes. It denounced the awful libertinism of that age, and showed that the-weakness, the ignorance, the vanity, and the seclusion of women prepared them to become the tool and minion of bad men's lust. It criticised ably the educational system of Rousseau, and, with still more severity, the popular works of bishops and priests, who chiefly strove to inculcate an abject submission to man as the rightful lord of the sex. It demonstrated that the sole possibility of woman's elevation to the rank of man's equal and friend was in the cultivation of her mind, and in the thoughtful discharge of the duties of her lot. It is a really noble and brave little book, undeserving of the oblivion into which it has fallen. No intelligent woman, no wise parent with daughters to rear, could read it now without pleasure and advantage.
"Meekness," she says,