From what has been already stated, it will be seen, how little education had to do with the formation of this great man's mind. He was, indeed, a mere child of nature, and nature seems to have been too proud and too jealous of her work, to permit it to be touched by the hand of art. She gave him Shakespeare's genius, and bade him, like Shakspeare, to depend on that alone. Let not the youthful reader, however, deduce, from the example of Mr. Henry, an argument in favour of indolence and the contempt of study. Let him remember that the powers which surmounted the disadvantage of those early habits, were such as very rarely appear upon this earth. Let him remember, too, how long the genius, even of Mr. Henry, was kept down and hidden from the public view, by the sorcery of those pernicious habits; through what years of poverty and wretchedness they doomed him to struggle; and, let him remember; that at length, when in the zenith of his glory, Mr. Henry himself, had frequent occasions to deplore the consequences of his early neglect of literature, and to bewail “the ghosts of his departed hours.”

His father, unable to sustain, with convenience, the expense of so large a family as was now multiplying on his hands, found it necessary to qualify his sons, at a very early age, to support themselves. With this view, Patrick was placed, at the age of fifteen, behind the counter of a merchant in the country. How he conducted himself in this situation, I have not been able to learn. There could not, however, I presume, have been any flagrant impropriety in his conduct, since, in the next year, his father considered him qualified to carry on business, on his own account. Under this impression, he purchased a small adventure of goods for his two sons, William and Patrick, and, according to the language of the country, “set them up in trade.” William's habits of idleness were, if possible, still more unfortunate than Patrick's. The chief management of their concerns devolved, therefore, on the younger brother, and that management seems to have been most wretched.

Left to himself, all the indolence of his character returned. Those unfortunate habits which he had formed, and whose spell was already, too strong to be broken, comported very poorly with that close attention, that accuracy and persevering vigour, which are essential to the merchant. The drudgery of retailing and of book-keeping soon became intolerable; yet he was obliged to preserve appearances by remaining, continually, at his stand. Besides these unpropitious habits, there was still another obstacle to his success, in the natural kindness of his temper. “He could not find it in his heart” to disappoint any one who came to him for credit; and he was very easily satisfied by apologies for non-payment. He condemned, in himself, this facility of temper, and foresaw the embarrassments with which it threatened him; but he was unable to overcome it. Even with the best prospects, the confinement of such a business would have been scarcely supportable; but with those which now threatened him, his store became a prison. To make the matter still worse, the joys of the chase, joys now to him forbidden, echoed around him every morning, and by their contrast, and the longings which they excited, contributed to deepen the disgust which he had taken to his employments.

From these painful reflections, and the gloomy forebodings which darkened the future, he sought, at first, a refuge in music, for which it seems he had a natural taste, and he learned to play well on the violin and on the flute. From music he passed to books, and, having procured a few light and elegant authors, acquired, for the first time, a relish for reading.

He found another relief, too, in the frequent opportunities now afforded him of pursuing his favourite study of the human character. The character of every customer underwent this scrutiny; and that, not with reference either to the integrity or solvency of the individual, in which one would suppose that Mr. Henry would feel himself most interested; but in relation to the structure of his mind, the general cast of his opinions, the motives and principles which influenced his actions, and what may be called the philosophy of character. In pursuing these investigations, he is said to have resorted to arts, apparently so far above his years, and which look so much like an after-thought, resulting from his future eminence, that I should hesitate to make the statement, were it not attested by so many witnesses, and by some who cannot be suspected of the capacity for having fabricated the fact. Their account of it, then, is this; that whenever a company of his customers met in the store, (which frequently happened on the last day of the week) and were, themselves, sufficiently gay and animated to talk and act as nature prompted, without concealment, without reserve, he would take no part in their discussions, but listen with a silence as deep and attentive, as if under the influence of some potent charm. If, on the contrary, they were dull and silent, he would, without betraying his drift, task himself to set them in motion, and excite them to remark, collision, and exclamation. He was peculiarly delighted with comparing their characters, and ascertaining how they would, severally, act, in given situations. With this view he would state an hypothetic case, and call for their opinions, one by one, as to the conduct which would be proper in it. If they differed, he would demand their reasons, and enjoy highly, the debates in which he would thus involve them. By multiplying and varying those imaginary cases at pleasure, he ascertained the general course of human opinion, and formed, for himself, as it were, a graduated scale of the motives and conduct which are natural to man. Sometimes he would entertain them with stories, gathered from his reading, or, as was more frequently the case, drawn from his own fancy, composed of heterogeneous circumstances, calculated to excite, by turns, pity, terror, resentment, indignation, contempt; pausing, in the turns of his narrative, to observe the effect; to watch the different modes in which the passions expressed themselves, and learn the language of emotion from those children of nature.

In these exercises, Mr. Henry could have had nothing in view beyond the present gratification of a natural propensity. The advantages of them, however, were far more permanent, and gave the brightest colours to his future life. For those continual efforts to render himself intelligible to his plain and unlettered hearers, on subjects entirely new to them, taught him that clear and simple style which forms the best vehicle of thought to a popular assembly; which his attempts to interest and affect them, in order that he might hear from them the echo of nature's voice, instructed him in those topics of persuasion by which men were the most certainly to be moved, and in the kind of imagery and structure of language, which were the best fitted to strike and agitate their hearts. These constituted his excellences as an orator; and never was there a man, in any age, who possessed, in a more eminent degree, the lucid and nervous style of argument, the command of the most beautiful and striking imagery, or that language of passion which burns from soul to soul.

In the mean time, the business of the store was rushing headlong, to its catastrophe. One year put an end to it. William was then thrown loose upon society, to which he was never, afterwards, usefully attached; * and Patrick was engaged, for the two or three following years, in winding up this disastrous experiment as well as he could.

His misfortunes, however, seem not to have had the effect either of teaching him prudence or of chilling his affections. For, at the early age of eighteen, we find him married to a miss Shelton, the daughter of an honest farmer in the neighbourhood, but in circumstances too poor to contribute effectually to her support. By the joint assistance of their parents, however, the young couple were settled on a small farm, and, here, with the assistance of one or two slaves, Mr. Henry had to delve the earth, with his own hands, for subsistence. Such are the vicissitudes of human life! It is curious to contemplate this giant genius, destined in a few years to guide the councils of a mighty nation, but unconscious of the intellectual treasures which he possessed, encumbered, at the early age of eighteen, with the cares of a family; obscure, unknown and almost unpitied; digging, with wearied limbs and with an aching heart, a small

* I have seen an original letter from col. John Henry to his son William, in which he remonstrates with him on his wild and dissipated course of life. There is reason to believe, however, that at a later period, he may have reformed, since a gentleman, to whom the manuscript of this work was submitted, notes on this passage, that when he was at college at Williamsburg, he recollects to have seen William Henry a member of the assembly, from the county of Fluvanna; that he was called colonel, and was, he afterwards understood, pretty well provided as to fortune.

Williamsburg, then the seat of government, was the focus of fashion and high life. The residence of the governor; (the immediate representative of the sovereign,) the royal state in which he lived, the polite and brilliant circle which he always had about him, diffused their influence through the city and the circumjacent country, and filled Williamsburg with a degree of emulation, taste, and elegance, of which we can form no conception by the appearances of the present day. During the session of the house of burgesses, too, these stately modes of life assumed their richest forms; the town, was filled with a concourse of visitors, as well as citizens, attired in their gayest colours; the streets, exhibited a continual scene of animated and glittering tumult; the houses, of costly profusion.

Such was the scene in which Mr. Henry was now called upon, for the first time, to make his appearance. He made no preparation for it, but went down just in the kind of garb which he had been accustomed to exhibit all his life, and is said to have worn, on this occasion particularly, a suit which had suffered very considerably in the service. The contrast which he exhibited, with the general elegance of the place, was so striking, as to call upon him the eyes of all the curious and the mischievous; and, as he moved awkwardly about, in his coarse and threadbare dress, with a countenance of abstraction and total unconcern as to what was passing around him, (interesting as it seemed to every one else,) he was stared at by some as a prodigy, and regarded by others as an unfortunate being, whose senses were disordered. When he went to attend the committee of privileges and elections, the matter was still worse. “The proud airs of aristocracy,” says judge Tyler, detailing this incident of Mr. Henry's life, “added to the dignified forms of that truly august body, were enough to have deterred any man possessing less firmness and independence of spirit than Mr. Henry. He was ushered with great state and ceremony into the room of the committee, whose chairman was col. Bland. * Mr. Henry was dressed in very coarse apparel; no one knew any thing of him,† and scarcely was he treated with decent respect by any one except the chairman, who could not do so much violence to his feelings and principles, as to depart on any occasion, from the delicacy of the gentleman. But the general contempt was soon changed into as general admiration; for Mr. Henry distinguished himself by a copious and brilliant display on the great subject of the rights of suffrage, superior to any thing that had been heard before within those walls. Such a burst of eloquence, from a man so very plain and ordinary in his appearance, struck the committee with amazement; so that a deep and

* Mr. Tyler says, “that enlightened and amiable man, John Blair;” but in this he is corrected by the journal, which shows that Mr. Bland was the chairman of the committee of privileges and elections for that year. I should have thought, from the general accuracy of Mr. Tyler's statement, that Mr. Blair might have been officiating as chairman pro tempore, in the absence of col. Bland; but that Mr. Blair does not appear, by the journal, to have belonged to the committee, or even to have been a member of the house in 1764. His name does not appear till 1766.

Mr. Tyler, reciting Mr. Henry's own narrative, after a lapse of several years, might very easily have confounded two names as similar as those of Bland and Blair.