In the development of her mind and character he pursued a clearly-defined and well-directed course. When she was ten years old he wrote to his wife from Philadelphia, where he was at the time occupying a seat in the Senate, reminding her that he had left a memorandum of what Theodosia was to learn during his absence. While his public duties were such that he was not able always to personally superintend her studies, he gave minute instructions to the tutors to whom he intrusted her, and constituted himself their vigilant and inexorable critic. "If your young teacher," he wrote to her when she was in her sixteenth year, "after a week's trial should not suit you, dismiss him on any pretence, without wounding his pride, and take the old Scotchman. Resolve to succeed, and you cannot fail." Mary Wollstonecraft's book, "A Vindication of the Rights of Women," in which Burr became so absorbed that he sat up all night reading it, so affected him that its influence told on all Theodosia's life. On the principles it inculcated were based both her mental and moral development. "If I could foresee," he wrote to his wife, "that Theodosia would become a mere fashionable woman with all the attendant frivolity and vacuity of mind, adorned with whatever grace and allurement, I would earnestly pray God to take her forthwith hence. But I yet hope by her to convince the world what neither sex appears to believe,--that women have souls." "And do you regret," he wrote to Theodosia herself, when she was a little more than sixteen, "you are not also a woman? That you are not numbered in that galaxy of beauty which adorns an assembly-room? Coquetting for admiration and attracting flattery? No. I answer with confidence. You feel that you are maturing for solid friendship. The friends you gain you will never lose; and no one, I think, will dare to insult your understanding by such compliments as are most graciously received by too many of your sex." Burr was himself an ornament to many a drawing-room, and no man ever had better opportunities for estimating the deficiencies in the system of educating the women of his day. Theodosia he brought up like a young Spartan, with few or none of the feminine affectations then in vogue. Courage and fortitude were his darling virtues, and so instilled into her from her infancy that they formed almost the groundwork of her character. "No apologies or explanations. I hate them," he said, reproving her for some fault of omission when she was a little child. "I beg and expect it of you," he wrote to her from Richmond, where he was awaiting trial for treason, and whither she was hastening to him, "that you will conduct yourself as becomes my daughter, and that you manifest no signs of weakness or alarm."