"Let us have the magnanimity, sir, to lay aside our antipathies and prejudices, and consider the subject in a political light. Those are an enterprising, moneyed people-they will be serviceable in taking off the surplus produce of our lands, and supplying us with necessaries, during the infant state of our manufactures. Even if they be inimical to us in point of feeling and principle, I can see no objection, in a political view, in making them tributary to our advantage. And as I have no prejudices to prevent my making this use of them, so, sir, I have no fear of any mischief that they can do us. Afraid of them!-what, sir," said he, rising to one of his loftiest attitudes, and assuming a look of the most indignant and sovereign contempt,-" shall we, who have laid the proud British lion at our feet, now be afraid of his whelps?" — Ibid. p. 254.

The concluding figure is said to have produced an amazing effect, which is highly probable, for it not only addressed the reason, but tickled the vanity of the assembly.

Mr. Henry was elected a member of the Convention which met to discuss the constitution of the United States in 1788. Their debates and proceedings have been fully reported by Mr. Robertson of Virginia, but he admits the impossibility of doing justice to such a speaker as Henry, and we find little worth quoting.

In one of Curran's most celebrated speeches he was struggling for an illustration of his client's innocence. It was clear asas-' (at this moment the sun shone into the court) 'clear as yonder sunbeam that now bursts upon us with its splendid coruscations.' Henry thus worked up a somewhat similar incident: :

'After describing, in accents which spoke to the soul, and to which every other bosom deeply responded, the awful immensity of the question (the adoption of the Constitution) to the present and future generations, and the throbbing apprehensions with which he looked to the issue, he passed from the house and from the earth, and looking, as he said, "beyond that horizon which binds mortal eyes," he pointed-with a countenance and action that made the blood run back upon the aching heart" to those celestial beings who were hovering over the scene, and waiting with anxiety for a decision which involved the happiness or misery of more than half the human race." To those beings-with the same thrilling look and action -he had just addressed an invocation that made every nerve shudder with supernatural horror-when, lo! a storm at that instant arose which shook the whole building, and the spirits whom he had called seemed to have come at his bidding. Nor did his eloquence, or the storm, immediately cease-but, availing himself of the incident with a master's art, he seemed to mix in the fight of his ethereal auxiliaries, and, "rising on the wings of the tempest, to seize upon the artillery of Heaven, and direct its fiercest thunders against the heads of his adversaries." The scene became insupportable;

and

and the house rose without the formality of adjournment, the members rushing from their seats with precipitation and confusion.'-Wirt, pp. 312, 313.

We cannot help suspecting that the members rushed out, not so much from the confounding effect of Henry's eloquence as for fear the building should come crumbling upon their heads. It was, however, no trifling matter to induce them to keep their places till he had done.

In the same session he obtained a triumph of a different order. A young member of the federal party, the son of an officer of rank, who had been educated in England and resided there during the whole period of the revolution, had the bad taste to make a direct set at Henry. The occasion he chose was in reply to a speech in which the veteran had expressed his readiness at all times and on all occasions to bow, with the utmost deference, to the majesty of the people.' Being endowed with a lively fancy, a graceful address, and easy sprightly elocution, he rang the changes on these words with considerable felicity through thirteen periods, concluding each period with a bow. Among other things he said it was of little importance whether a country was ruled by a despot with a tiara on his head, or by a demagogue in a red cloak and a caul-bare wig (describing Henry's dress), although he should profess on all occasions to bow to the majesty of the people. Henry raised himself up heavily, and with affected awkwardness:

"Mr. Speaker," said he, "I am a plain man, and have been educated altogether in Virginia. My whole life has been spent among planters, and other plain men of similar education, who have never had the advantage of that polish which a court alone can give, and which the gentleman over the way has so happily acquired; indeed, sir, the gentleman's employments and mine (in common with the great mass of his countrymen) have been as widely different as our fortunes; for while that gentleman was availing himself of the opportunity which a splendid fortune afforded him, of acquiring a foreign education, mixing among the great, attending levees and courts, basking in the beams of royal favour at St. James's, and exchanging courtesies with crowned heads, I was engaged in the arduous toils of the revolution; and was probably as far from thinking of acquiring those polite accomplishments which the gentleman has so successfully cultivated, as that gentleman then was from sharing in the toils and dangers in which his unpolished countrymen were engaged. I will not, therefore, presume to vie with the gentleman in those courtly accomplishments of which he has just given the house so agreeable a specimen; yet such a bow as I can make shall be ever at the service of the people." Herewith, although there was no man who could make a more graceful bow than Mr. Henry, he made one so ludicrously awkward and clownish, as took the house by surprise, and put them into a roar of laughter. "The gentleman, I

hope,

hope, will commiserate the disadvantages of education under which I have laboured, and will be pleased to remember that I have never been a favourite with that monarch whose gracious smile he has had the happiness to enjoy." He pursued this contrast of situations and engagements for fifteen or twenty minutes without a smile, and without the smallest token of resentment, either in countenance, expression, or manner. You would almost have sworn," says a correspondent, "that he thought himself making his apology for his own awkwardness before a full drawing-room at St. James's. I believe there was not a person that heard him, the sufferer himself excepted, who did not feel every risible nerve affected. His adversary meantime hung down his head, and sinking lower and lower, until he was almost concealed behind the interposing forms, submitted to the discipline as quietly as a Russian malefactor who had been beaten with the knout till all sense of feeling was lost."-pp. 322-324.

This reminds us of Lord Chatham's attack on Lord Mansfield, as described in a letter from the first Lord Holland to the Marquis of Hartington - Every word was Murray; yet so managed that neither he nor anybody else could or did take public notice of it, or in any degree reprehend him. I sat near Murray, who suffered for an hour.'

A long and elaborate report of his argument on the question of the British debts-whether debts due to British subjects were recoverable-has been preserved; and though its imperfections are frankly admitted by the reporter, it proves that Henry could thoroughly master a great legal question, and argue according to the strict rules of logic when he chose. (See Wirt, p. 331.) The case of John Hook is ordinarily put forward as an example of what he could do in the comic line. This Hook was a Scotchman, fond of money, and suspected of being unfavourable to the American cause. Two of his bullocks had been seized for the use of the troops in 1781; and so soon as peace was established he brought an action against the commissary. Henry was engaged for the defence:

'He painted the distresses of the American army, exposed almost naked to the rigour of a winter's sky, and marking the frozen ground over which they marched with the blood of their unshod feet. "Where was the man," he said, "who had an American heart in his bosom, who would not have thrown open his fields, his barns, his cellars, the doors of his house, the portals of his breast, to have received with open arms the meanest soldier in that little band of famished patriots? Where is the man? There he stands; but whether the heart of an American beats in his bosom, you, gentlemen, are to judge." He then carried the jury, by the powers of his imagination, to the plains around York, the surrender of which had followed shortly after the act complained of. He depicted the surrender in the most glowing and noble colours of his eloquence the audience saw before their eyes the humiliation and de

jection

jection of the British, as they marched out of their trenches: they saw the triumph which lighted up every patriot face, and heard the shouts of victory, and the cry of Washington and liberty, as it rang and echoed through the American ranks, and was reverberated from the hills and shores of the neighbouring river. "But hark! what notes of discord are these which disturb the general joy, and silence the acclamationsɔ f victory? they are the notes of John Hook, hoarsely bawling through the American camp, beef! beef! beef!"'-pp. 389, 390.*

It is added that the clerk of the court, unable to contain himself, and unwilling to commit any breach of decorum, rushed out and was found rolling on the grass in a paroxysm of laughter by Hook, the hero of the day. Jemmy Steptoe, what the devil ails ye, mon?' Mr. Steptoe could only say that he could not help it. 'Never mind ye,' said the defendant; wait till Billy Cowan gets up; he'll show him the la'.' Billy Cowan's exertions, however, proved vain. The cause was decided by acclamation; and a cry of tar and feathers having succeeded to that of beef, Mr. Hook was fain to make a precipitate retreat.

His last appearance on the stage of public life was in 1799, when, alarmed at the violent measures meditated by the democratic party, he thought it his duty to stem the torrent, and presented himself as a candidate for the House of Delegates for Charlotte County. On the day of election he received such homage from the people that a baptist minister demanded why they followed him about: Mr. Henry is not a god.'No, indeed, my friend,' was the reply; I am but a poor worm, as fleeting and unsubstantial as the shadow of the cloud that flies over your fields, and is remembered no more.' In the course of his address he painted the horrors that would ensue if they compelled Washington to march against them :

"And where (he asked) are our resources to meet such a conflict? -Where is the citizen of America who will dare to lift his hand against the father of his country?" A drunken man in the crowd threw up his arm, and exclaimed that "he dared to do it."—“No,” answered Mr. Henry, rising aloft in all his majesty: you dare not do it: in such a parricidal attempt, the steel would drop from your nerveless arm!" "

66

He was elected by a large majority, and the assembly was thrown into commotion by the tidings of his approach; but his health was irretrievably broken, the crisis was accelerated by the agitations of the period, and on June 6th, 1799, he died.

The person of an orator who produced such effects by action is important. Henry was tall and raw-boned, with a slight

This passage was introduced with considerable felicity by Mr. Charles Phillips, in his speech against a gentleman who had prosecuted two of his servants for feloniously appropriating to their own use sundry slices of a boiled round of beef.

stoop

stoop of the shoulders; his complexion was dark and sunburnt, without any appearance of blood in the cheeks; his ordinary expression was that of gravity, and he had an habitual contraction of the brow, which gave him a look of harshness till he spoke. His forehead was high and straight-nose Roman, and eyes of singular power and brilliancy, overshadowed by dark thick eyebrows. His voice was clear, firm, and of extraordinary compass. His delivery was easy and natural when he warmed; but he often hesitated at the commencement, and had the air of labouring under a distressing degree of modesty or timidity, which indeed continued to characterise his manner throughout, unless he was led to throw it off by some high excitement. His information was very limited, for his disinclination to study returned him so upon soon as his reputation was established. • Take my word for it,' was his remark to a friend in advanced life, we are too old to read books: read men-they are the only volumes we can read to advantage.' What he did read was always ready for use. Mr. Lee (the Cicero of the Virginian Assembly) was descanting tediously, till a late hour, on the beauties of Don Quixote. Henry assented, but added, you have overlooked in your eulogy one of the finest things in the book-the divine exclamation of Sancho-" Blessed be the man who first invented sleep: it covers one all over, like a cloak."

We have already suggested a parallel; and no one can help being struck by the striking resemblance which Henry's oratory (so far as it can be collected from description) bears to Lord Chatham's, notwithstanding the startling discrepancy between their birth, breeding, tastes, habits, and pursuits. The one, a born member of the English aristocracy-the other, the son of a Virginian farmer: the one, educated at Eton and Oxford-the other, picking up a little Latin grammar at a day-school: the one, reading Bailey's Dictionary twice over, and articulating before a glass to perfect his use of language-the other, affecting a still greater carelessness of style and rusticity of pronunciation than were natural to him: the one, so fine a gentleman and so inveterate an actor, that, before receiving the most insignificant visitor, he was wont to call for his wig, and settle himself in an imposing attitude-the other, slouching into the provincial parliament with his leather gaiters and shootingjacket. But they meet in all the grand leading elemental points -in fire, force, energy and intrepidity-the sagacity that works by intuition-the faculty of taking in the entire subject at a glance, or lighting up a whole question by a metaphor—the fondness for Saxon words, short uninverted idiomatic sentences, downright assertions, and hazardous apostrophes-above all, in the

singular