Page:The Presidents of the United States, 1789-1914, v. I.djvu/149

THOMAS JEFFERSON 115 Coke, of whom he said that "a sounder Whig never wrote, nor one of prof ounder learning in the ortho dox doctrines of the British constitution, or in what were called British liberties." It was his settled conviction that the early drill of the colonial law yers in "Coke upon Lyttleton" prepared them for the part they took in resisting the unconstitutional acts of the British government. Lawyers formed by Coke, he would say, were all good Whigs; but from the time that Blackstone became the leading text-book "the profession began to slide into Toryism." His own study of Coke led him to ex tend his researches into the origins of British law, and led him also to the rejection of the maxim of Sir Matthew Hale, that Christianity is parcel of the laws of England. His youthful treatise on this complex and difficult point shows us at once the minuteness and the extent of his legal studies. While he was a student of law, he was an eye witness of those memorable scenes in the Virginia legislature which followed the passage of the stamp-act. He was present as a spectator in the house when Patrick Henry read his five resolutions, written upon a blank leaf torn from a "Coke upon Lyttleton," enunciating the principle that English men living in America had all the rights of Eng lishmen living in England, the chief of which was that they could only be taxed by their own repre sentatives. When he was an old man, seated at