feeling and following...........

 But even Maury thought that the purpose of learning a bit of history, literature, and geography was essentially social, in that a smattering of such knowledge would enable "a Virginia gentleman" to converse with confidence and thus same him from the embarrassment of making "a ridiculous & awkward Figure in Life."

     Indeed, judging by Jefferson's literary commonplace book, into which he copied passages from authors who had caught his attention, Maury immersed the young man in the classics. There are few better ways to study a literary passage than to write it out in one's own hand, feeling each word and following the flow of thought.  Not surprisingly for an intelligent fourteen-year-old who had just lost his father, Jefferson was especially inclined toward commentaries on mortality.  He began by copying several passages from Cicero's Tusculum Disputations about the inevitability of death.  Jefferson liked Cicero's essays, considering him "the first master" of style, but in notable contrast to the taste of the time, held the Roman's speeches in low esteem.  The best models of oratory, he wrote, were "Livy, Tacitus, Sallust, & most assuredly not in Cicero."

-Thomas E. Ricks, First Principles: What America's Founders Learned from the Greeks and Romans and How That Shaped Our Country