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.
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