Viewing page 85 of 130

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

in which they move. Yet, many of them have been so situated that they might have availed themselves of the conversation of their masters; many may have been brought up to the handicraft of arts, and, from that circumstance, have been always assisted with the whites. Some have been liberally educated; and all have lived in countries where the arts and sciences have been cultivated a considerable degree, and have before their eyes the samples of the best works from abroad. Never could I find that a black had uttered a thought above the level of plain narration. Misery, he continues, is of the parent of the most affecting touches in poetry -- Among the blacks is misery enough, God knows, but no poetry. He adds, love is the peculiar cestrum of the poet. Their love is ardent, but it kindles the senses only, not the imagination. Religion, indeed, has produces a Phillis Whately; but it could not produce a poet. Ignatius Sancho has approached nearer merit in composition; yet his letters do more to honor to the heart, than to the head. He is often happy in the turn of his compliments, and his stile is easy and familiar. But his imagination is wild and extravagant; escapes incessantly from every restraint of reason and taste, and, in the course of its vagaries leaves a tract of thought as incoherent and eccentric as in the course of a meteor through the sky." -- After this, Mr. Jefferson contrasts the enslaved Africans in the United States, with the Roman slaves, in order to shew the vast inferiority of the former in all exercises of the mental powers. 
These remarks upon the genius of the African negro appear to me to have so little foundation in the true philosophy that few observations will be necessary to refute them.*
If the principle maintained by Lavater, and by St. Gall, that the form of the skull is indicative of the peculiar talents, and even of the inclinations and dispositions of men, be founded in nature will it 

*Mr. Jefferson reasons much better when he undertakes to defend the people of the United States, and the aboriginals of the American continent, against the aspersions of Mr. Buf-fon, and the Abbe Raynal, and generally, the the European writers, who impute to them great debility both of mental and bodily powers;  because men ranging the forest for game, and pressed by incessant wants; or, on the other hand, occupied in personal labors in clearing and bring into a state of cultivation the soil of a new world, have not produced such poets as Homer or Pope, such philosophers as Aristo-tle, or Locke, or such orators as Demosthenes of Chatham -- See his answer to 6th query, towards the end, in this notes on Virginia.