William Jay, the second son of John Jay, the first Chief-Justice of the United States, and his wife, Sarah Van Brugh Livingston, was born in the city of New York the 16th of June, 1789. New York was then the seat of the Federal Government, and the year is memorable as that in which the National Constitution superseded the Articles of Confederation, while the inauguration of Washington marked a new era in American history. During the absence of John Jay in England, while negotiating the "Jay treaty," he was elected Governor of New York, and returned home to assume that office in 1795. William, then eight years old, was placed at school with the Rev. Thomas Ellison, the rector of St. Peter's Church, Albany. There he received an old-fashioned training. In 1801 he wrote to his father: "Mr. Ellison put me in Virgil, and I can now say the first two eclogues by heart, and construe and parse and scan them." And later on: "I learn nothing but Latin." Among his schoolmates was J. Fenimore Cooper, who afterwards drew a portrait of their old instructor in one of his "Sketches of England," addressed to Jay: "Thirty-six years ago you and I were schoolfellows and classmates in the house of a clergyman of the true English school. This man was an epitome of the national prejudices and in some respects of the national character. He was the son of a beneficed clergyman in England, had been regularly graduated at Oxford and admitted to orders; entertained a most profound reverence for the King and the nobility; was not backward in expressing his contempt for all classes of dissenters and all ungentlemanly sects; was particularly severe on the immoralities of the French Revolution, and though eating our bread, was not especially lenient to our own; compelled you and me to begin Virgil with the eclogues, and Cicero with the knotty phrase that opens the oration in favour of the poet Archias, 'because these writers would not have placed them first in the books if they did not intend people to read them first'; spent his money freely and sometimes that of other people; was particularly tenacious of the ritual and of all the decencies of the Church; detested a democrat as he did the devil; cracked his jokes daily about Mr. Jefferson, never failing to place his libertinism in strong relief against the approved morals of George III., of several passages in whose history it is charitable to suppose he was ignorant; prayed fervently on Sunday, and decried all morals, institutions, churches, manners, and laws but those of England from Monday to Saturday." Still, Jay and Cooper were indebted to Ellison's thoroughness in the classics for much of the mental training, the correct taste, and the pure English which marked their subsequent intellectual efforts.