George Ticknor, Life, letters and journals of George Ticknor
George Hillard, Ed.

[348] a good, honest New-Englander, with a thousand dollars a year, would have more enjoyment of life than Mr. Barbour has with six or seven. . . . .

Early on Tuesday we arrived at Monticello. Everything here is on a larger scale than at Montpellier; the house, the grounds, and the arrangements. There is, too, nothing that marks the residence of an Ex-King. The family consists of Mr. Jefferson; Mrs. Randolph, his daughter, about fifty-two years old; Mr. Trist, a young Louisianian, who has married her fourth daughter; Miss Ellen; two other daughters, of eighteen and twenty; Mrs. Trist; four sons under sixteen; Mr. Harrison, a young lawyer of Harrisburg, who lately studied at Cambridge; Mr. Long,¹ just from Cambridge, England, apparently an excellent scholar, and now a professor in the University at Charlottesville; Mr. Webster; and ourselves. . . .

Yesterday we formed a party, and, with Mr. Jefferson at our head, went to the University.² It is a very fine establishment, consisting of ten houses for professors, four eating-houses, a rotunda on the model of the Parthenon, with a magnificent room for a library, and four fine lecture-rooms, with one hundred and eight apartments for students; the whole situated in the midst of two hundred and fifty acres of land, high, healthy, and with noble prospects all around it. It has cost two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, and the thorough finish of every part of it, and the beautiful architecture of the whole, show, I think, that it has not cost too much. Each professor receives his house, which in Charlottesville — the neighboring village—would rent for $600, a salary of $1,500, and a fee of $20 from every student who attends his instructions, which are to be lectures, three times a week. Of the details of the system I shall discourse much when I see you. It is more practical than I feared, but not so practical that I feel satisfied of its success. It is, however, an experiment worth trying, to which I earnestly desire the happiest results; and they have, to begin it, a mass of buildings more beautiful than anything architectural in New England, and more appropriate to an university than can be found, perhaps, in the world.

Mr. Jefferson is entirely absorbed in it, and its success would make a beau finale indeed to his life. He is now eighty-two years old, very little altered from what he was ten years ago, very active, lively, and happy, riding from ten to fifteen miles every day, and talking