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Great question! I'm just curiuos too... I'm studying the Greek playwrights and the Roman poets at school. At the moment I think that Jefferson studied them very well, and, because he was an open mind man, put into practise all 'the good things' he learned through them.
I will explain better when I will have finished the studyng course. Wait, please...
I haven't studied Locke yet...

I remember that also the Greek philosopher Aristotle created a catalog of his 'library'.
I will catalog my library this summer! Too caos!

I like reading Greek and Latin authors in original languages too. And you?
Thank you.

Interesting post. If I remember correctly, though, Jefferson didn't donate his books to the LOC, he sold them -- sort of a pre-modern (and Not Evil) Haliburton-type deal.

Dustin, you're right. He needed the money, too. No expensive book deals for ex-presidents back then, apparently.

"One person's mess is another person's desk"

Cool quotable line.
Even the "miscellaneous" can't run away
from a pithy aphorism!

And let that be a lesson of "to each their own" - what's a progressive time-saving technique may not work for another.

It was the British that burned Washington rather than just the Canadians.

This is from the hip, but I did my undergraduate thesis on the Antebellum South and the classics and I recall reading a bit about this. Although it's repeated over and over again by American historians, the evidence shows that Jefferson's Greek was pretty wobbly. It takes a lot to keep ones Greek up, and editions of Jefferson's day very often had the Latin on the opposite page. I recall reading an analysis of his commonplace book entries that laid bare what he really knew. He quotes from Latin at some length, showing understanding, but the Greek tends to be very short quotes probably taken from other contexts rather than deep reading of difficult authors. There's a big difference between passages from the Greek NT and understanding, say, Aeschylus, Pindar or even Thucydides.

As far as influences go, the "classics" of the 18c were rather different from what we think they are. Thucydides, for example, was not held in high regard--Greek democracy was understood primarily through Plutarch--and the Greek dramatists were, until the Romantics, mostly for scholars.

I can't remember anything about Washington's education, but I know he was 6 foot 20 and invented cocaine, see:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pc9y5ayeeb4&search=cox%20combes