it. The observer must live alone and always in the country; he must not worry himself about the ways of the world; he must be always, from day to day, watching the infinite changes and variations of Nature. Perhaps, even when the observer can actually read this book of Nature, his power of articulate speech may prove inadequate for the expression of what he sees. But Jefferies, as a boy, was more than an observer of the fields; he was bookish, and read all the books that he could borrow or buy. And presently, as is apt to be the fate of a bookish boy who cannot enter a learned profession, he became a journalist and obtained a post on the local paper. He developed literary ambitions, but for a long time to come was as one beating the air. He tried local history and novels; but his early novels, which were published at his own risk and expense, were, deservedly, failures. In 1872, however, he published a remarkable letter in The Times, on “The Wiltshire Labourer,” full of original ideas and of facts new to most readers. This was in reality the turning-point in his career. In 1873, after more false starts, Jefferies returned to his true field of work, the life of the country, and began to write for Fraser’s Magazine on “Farming and Farmers.” He had now found himself. The rest of his history is that of continual advance, from close observation becoming daily more and more close, to that intimate communion with Nature with which his later pages are filled. The developments of the later period are throughout touched with the melancholy that belongs to ill-health. For, though in his prose poem called “The Pageant of Summer” the writer seems absolutely revelling in the strength of manhood that belongs to that pageant, yet, in the Story of My Heart, written about the same time, we detect the mind that is continually turned to death. He died at Goring, worn out with many ailments, on the 14th of August 1887. The best-known books of Richard Jefferies are: The Gamekeeper at Home (1878); The Story of My Heart (1883); Life of the Fields (1884), containing the best paper he ever wrote, “The Pageant of Summer”; Amaryllis at the Fair (1884), in which may be found the portraits of his own people; and The Open Air. He stands among the scanty company of men who address a small audience, for whom he read aloud these pages of Nature spoken of above, which only he, and the few like unto him, can decipher.
See Sir Walter Besant, Eulogy of Richard Jefferies (1888); H. S. Salt, Richard Jefferies: a Study (1894); Edward Thomas, Richard Jefferies, his Life and Work (1909). (W. Be.)
JEFFERSON, JOSEPH (1820–1905), American actor, was born
in Philadelphia on the 20th of February 1829. He was the third
actor of this name in a family of actors and managers, and the
most famous of all American comedians. At the age of three he
appeared as the boy in Kotzebue’s Pizarro, and throughout his
youth he underwent all the hardships connected with theatrical
touring in those early days. After a miscellaneous experience,
partly as actor, partly as manager, he won his first pronounced
success in 1858 as Asa Trenchard in Tom Taylor’s Our American
Cousin at Laura Keene’s theatre in New York. This play was
the turning-point of his career, as it was of Sothern’s. The
naturalness and spontaneity of humour with which he acted the
love scenes revealed a spirit in comedy new to his contemporaries,
long used to a more artificial convention; and the touch of pathos
which the part required revealed no less to the actor an unexpected
power in himself. Other early parts were Newman Noggs
in Nicholas Nickleby, Caleb Plummer in The Cricket on the Hearth,
Dr Pangloss in The Heir at Law, Salem Scudder in The Octoroon,
and Bob Acres in The Rivals, the last being not so much an interpretation
of the character as Sheridan sketched it as a creation
of the actor’s. In 1859 Jefferson made a dramatic version of the
story of Rip Van Winkle on the basis of older plays, and acted
it with success at Washington. The play was given its permanent
form by Dion Boucicault in London, where (1865) it ran 170
nights, with Jefferson in the leading part. Jefferson continued
to act with undiminished popularity in a limited number of parts
in nearly every town in the United States, his Rip Van Winkle,
Bob Acres, and Caleb Plummer being the most popular. He was
one of the first to establish the travelling combinations which
superseded the old system of local stock companies. With the
exception of minor parts, such as the First Gravedigger in
Hamlet, which he played in an “all star combination” headed
by Edwin Booth, Jefferson created no new character after 1865;
and the success of Rip Van Winkle was so pronounced that he
has often been called a one-part actor. If this was a fault, it was
the public’s, who never wearied of his one masterpiece. Jefferson
died on the 23rd of April 1905. No man in his profession was
more honoured for his achievements or his character. He was
the friend of many of the leading men in American politics, art
and literature. He was an ardent fisherman and lover of nature,
and devoted to painting. Jefferson was twice married: to an
actress, Margaret Clements Lockyer (1832–1861), in 1850, and in
1867 to Sarah Warren, niece of William Warren the actor.
Jefferson’s Autobiography (New York, 1889) is written with admirable spirit and humour, and its judgments with regard to the art of the actor and of the playwright entitle it to a place beside Cibber’s Apology. See William Winter, The Jeffersons (1881), and Life of Joseph Jefferson (1894); Mrs. E. P. Jefferson, Recollections of Joseph Jefferson (1909).
JEFFERSON, THOMAS (1743–1826), third president of the
United States of America, and the most conspicuous apostle of
democracy in America, was born on the 13th of April 1743,
at Shadwell, Albemarle county, Virginia. His father, Peter
Jefferson (1707–1757), of early Virginian yeoman stock, was a
civil engineer and a man of remarkable energy, who became a
justice of the peace, a county surveyor and a burgess, served the
Crown in inter-colonial boundary surveys, and married into one
of the most prominent colonial families, the Randolphs. Albemarle
county was then in the frontier wilderness of the Blue
Ridge, and was very different, socially, from the lowland counties
where a few broad-acred families dominated an open-handed,
somewhat luxurious and assertive aristocracy. Unlike his
Randolph connexions, Peter Jefferson was a whig and a thorough
democrat; from him, and probably, too, from the Albemarle
environment, his son came naturally by democratic inclinations.
Jefferson carried with him from the college of William and Mary at Williamsburg, in his twentieth year, a good knowledge of Latin, Greek and French (to which he soon added Spanish, Italian and Anglo-Saxon), and a familiarity with the higher mathematics and natural sciences only possessed, at his age, by men who have a rare natural taste and ability for those studies. He remained an ardent student throughout life, able to give and take in association with the many scholars, American and foreign, whom he numbered among his friends and correspondents. With a liberal Scotsman, Dr William Small, then of the faculty of William and Mary and later a friend of Erasmus Darwin, and George Wythe (1726–1806), a very accomplished scholar and leader of the Virginia bar, Jefferson was an habitual member, while still in college, of a partie carrée at the table of Francis Fauquier (c. 1720–1768), the accomplished lieutenant-governor of Virginia. Jefferson was an expert violinist, a good singer and dancer, proficient in outdoor sports, and an excellent horseman. Thorough-bred horses always remained to him a necessary luxury. When it is added that Fauquier was a passionate gambler, and that the gentry who gathered every winter at Williamsburg, the seat of government of the province, were ruinously addicted to the same weakness, and that Jefferson had a taste for racing, it does credit to his early strength of character that of his social opportunities he took only the better. He never used tobacco, never played cards, never gambled, and was never party to a personal quarrel.
Soon after leaving college he entered Wythe’s law office, and in 1767, after five years of close study, was admitted to the bar. His thorough preparation enabled him to compete from the first with the leading lawyers of the colony, and his success shows that the bar had no rewards that were not fairly within his reach. As an advocate, however, he did not shine; a weakness of voice made continued speaking impossible, and he had neither the ability nor the temperament for oratory. To his legal scholarship and collecting zeal Virginia owed the preservation of a large part of her early statutes. He seems to have lacked interest in litigiousness, which was extraordinarily developed in colonial
