novelist. B. Nov. 6, 1848. Ed. village school. As a boy Jefferies ran away from home with the intention of walking to Moscow. The proprietor of the North Wiltshire Herald then adopted him into provincial journalism, and he also tried experiments in fiction. His early novels (The Scarlet Shawl, 1874, etc.) had little success. In 1877 his Gamekeeper at Home attracted attention, and he wrote a series of nature books which endeared him to all lovers of nature. He wrote further and more successful novels, but his chief work is his autobiographical Story of my Heart (1883), in which he gives expression to his Pantheistic philosophy, and sheds the last traces and relics of superstition," as he says. From early years he had been a great admirer of Goethe. In an article in Knowledge, (Jan. 5, 1883) he says: "In our age nothing is holy but humanity." Sir Walter Besant stated in his Eulogy of Richard Jefferies (1888) that he returned to Christianity before he died, but Mr. H. S. Salt has shown, in his Faith of Richard Jefferies (1905), that there is no truth in the story. He was a very liberal Pantheist and ardent humanitarian. D. Aug. 14, 1887.
Jefferson, Thomas, third President of the United States. B. Apr. 2, 1743. Ed. privately, and at William and Mary's College. He was admitted to the Bar in 1767, and was in 1769 elected to the House of Burgesses, where he led the opposition to the British authorities. In 1774 he published A Summary View of the Rights of British America. Elected to the Continental Congress in 1775, he drew up its reply to Lord North, and this, adopted on July 4, is known as the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson then spent two years in revising the whole code of laws of Virginia, and he was elected Governor of Virginia in 1779. In 1784 he went to Europe with Franklin and Adams (both Rationalists), and, remaining until 1789 as American representative at Paris, he associated intimately with D'Alembert and the French Rationalists. In 1789 he became First Secretary of State, in 1796 Vice-President of the Republic, and in 1800 President. He was re-elected in 1804. In the Memoir and Correspondence of T. Jefferson (1829) there are many letters, written in his later years, which show that he lived and died a very heterodox Deist. Though he believed in God and a future life, he called himself a Materialist. In a letter to Adams in 1820 he says: "To talk of immaterial existences is to talk of nothings" (iv, 331). He describes the Christian God as "a hocus-pocus phantasm of a God, like another Cerberus, with one body and three heads" (Dec. 8, 1822); and he entirely rejects the idea of revelation (Apr. 11, 1823). D. July 4, 1826.
Jeffrey, Lord Francis, judge. B. Oct 23. 1773. Ed. Glasgow High School and University, and Oxford (Queen's College). He was admitted to the Bar in 1794. Making little progress, however, he cultivated letters, and helped to found, and later edited, the Edinburgh Review. In 1829 he became Dean of the Faculty of Advocates, in 1830 Lord Advocate, and in 1834 Judge of the Court of Session. He was Lord Rector of Glasgow University in 1820. Hugh Miller says (in The Treasury of Modern Biography) that, although Jeffrey was "infected in youth and middle age by the widespread infidelity of the first French Revolution," he was later "of a different spirit." There is no trace of such a change in Lord Cockburn's Life and Letters of Lord Jeffrey (1852). D. Jan. 26, 1850.
Jensen, Professor Peter Christian Albrecht, Ph.D., German orientalist. B. Aug. 16, 1861. Ed. Schleswig Domschule, and Leipzig and Berlin Universities. He was appointed extraordinary professor of Semitic languages at Marburg University in 1892, and he has been ordinary professor there since 1895. Professor Jensen is one of the chief living authorities on the Hittites, Babylonians, and Assyrians, and
