JEFFERSON wrote several essays in the artistic form Aristotle insists on for a poem—with a beginning, a middle, and an end. But it was an accident. He was a great artist in the construction of state papers. The Declaration of Independence has no equal as a piece of composition among the state papers of any other country. In America its only rival is Washington’s Farewell Address and its only superior Jefferson’s own First Inaugural Address. As a writer of political letters, Jefferson is so easily first that he has no good second. He had an almost incomparable genius for working through others, and he made letter writing the means of exercising it. His letters mount from the hundreds into the thousands, and the style he gets from his correspondence appears in his more formal writing. In his “Notes on Virginia,” however, he frequently approximates the essay, and once or twice achieves it in due form. But in everything except his state papers, he is obviously careless of form; while over and above the form in whatever he writes are the ideas which have worked in all the ferment of eighteenth and nineteenth century politics.