"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 to his mettle. When other lawyers were employed against him, Hamilton's manner was that of a man who felt an easy superiority to the demands upon him; he took few notes; he was playful and careless, relying much upon the powerful declamation of his summing up. But when Burr was in the case,—Burr the wary, the vigilant, who was never careless, never inattentive, who came into court only after an absolutely exhaustive preparation of his case, who held declamation in contempt, and knew how to quench its effect by a stroke of polite satire, or the quiet citation of a fact,—then Hamilton was obliged to have all his wits about him, and he was observed to be restless, busy, and serious. There are now but two or three venerable men among us who remember the keen encounters of these two distinguished lawyers. The vividness of their recollection of those scenes of sixty years ago shows what an impression must have been made upon their youthful minds.
If Hamilton and Burr divided equally between them the honors of the bar, Burr had the additional distinction of being a leader of the rising Democratic Party; the party to which, at that day, the youth, the genius, the sentiment, of the country were powerfully drawn; the party which, by his masterly tactics, was about to place Mr. Jefferson in the Presidential chair after ten years of ineffectual struggle.
All this enhanced the éclat of Theodosia's position. As she rode about the island on her pony, followed at a respectful distance, as the custom then was, by one of her father's slaves mounted on a coach-horse, doubtless many a fair damsel of the city repined at her own homelier lot, while she dwelt upon the many advantages which nature and circumstances had bestowed upon this gifted and happy maiden.
She was a beautiful girl. She inherited all her father's refined beauty of countenance; also his shortness of stature; the dignity, grace, and repose of his incomparable manner, too. She was a plump, petite, and rosy girl; but there was that in her demeanor which became the daughter of an affluent home, and a certain assured, indescribable expression of face which seemed to say, Here is a maiden who to the object of her affection could be faithful against an execrating world,—faithful even unto death.
Burr maintained at that time two establishments, one in the city, the other a mile and a half out of town on the banks of the Hudson. Richmond Hill was the name of his country seat, where Theodosia resided during the later years of her youth. It was a large, massive, wooden edifice, with a lofty portico of Ionic columns, and stood on a hill facing the river, in the midst of a lawn adorned with ancient trees and trained shrubbery. The grounds, which extended to the water's edge, comprised about a hundred and sixty acres. Those who now visit the site of Burr's abode, at the corner of Charlton and Varick streets, behold a wilderness of very ordinary houses covering a dead level. The hill has been pared away, the ponds filled up, the river pushed away a long distance from the ancient shore, and every one of the venerable trees is gone. The city shows no spot less suggestive of rural beauty. But Richmond Hill, in the days of Hamilton and Burr, was the finest country residence on the island of Manhattan. The wife of John Adams, who lived there in 1790, just before Burr bought it, and who had recently travelled in the loveliest counties of England, speaks of it as a situation not inferior in natural beauty to the most delicious spot she ever saw. "The house," she says,