PATRICK HENRY.

CHAPTER I.

Birth and Parentage.

Education.

Commences

Business as a Merchant. Fails, and attempts Agriculture. Second unsuccessful Attempt in Trade.Marriage.— Admitted to the Bar.

PATRICK HENRY is, in more than in one particular, among the most remarkable characters of the revolutionary period of our history. He is declared by Jefferson to have been "the greatest orator that ever lived," and "the person who, beyond all question, gave the first impulse to the movement, which terminated in the revolution." Whatever exaggeration, if any, may be supposed to have crept into these sweeping statements, it is certain that the merits and services which had power to call them forth from such a quarter, must have been of no ordinary kind.

Indeed, the accounts that have been trans

mitted to us of the actual effects of his eloquence upon the minds of his hearers, though resting apparently on the best authority, seem almost fabulous, and certainly surpass any that we have on record of the results produced by the most distinguished orators of ancient or modern Europe. Something must probably be allowed for the excited imagination of the authors of these accounts; but the necessity for making this allowance proves, of itself, the extent to which Henry possessed what may be regarded as the essence of the highest kind of eloquence, and powers of strongly exciting the imagination of his hearers.

His claim to the honor of having given the first impulse to the revolutionary movement, is a question hardly susceptible of a satisfactory solution, since no event, prior to the battle of Lexington and the declaration of independence, was so decidedly different in character from a variety of others occurring at about the same time, as to merit, in contradistinction from them, the praise of being the first step in the progress of the revolution. It is certain, however, that, in one of the two leading colonies, during the period immediately preceding the revolution, Henry was constantly in advance of the most ardent patriots, and that he suggested and carried into effect, by his immediate personal in

fluence, measures that were opposed as premature and violent by all the other eminent supporters of the cause of liberty. It was the good fortune of Henry to enjoy, during his lifetime, the appropriate reward of his extraordinary merits, and the almost unbounded admiration and respect of his countrymen.

By general acknowledgment, the greatest orator of his day; elevated by his transcendent talents to a sort of supremacy in the deliberative assemblies of which he was occasionally a member, and the courts of justice in which he exercised his profession; clothed, whenever he chose to accept them, with the highest executive functions in the gift of the people; happy in his domestic relations and private circumstances, his career was one of almost unbroken prosperity. He has also been eminently fortunate in the manner in which the history of his life has been written. While the recollection of his eloquence and the admiration of his character were still fresh in the minds of numerous surviving contemporaries, the task of collecting and recording the expressions of them, which were circulating in conversation, or merely ephemeral notes, was undertaken by one whose kindred eloquence and virtues rendered him on every account the fittest person to do justice to the subject. In the following sketch, I can claim little other merit,