language
was used by a Mr. Henry, a young lawyer, who had not been above a
month a member of the House, and who carried all the young members
with him."[85] But a far more specific and intense expression of
antipathy came, a few weeks later, from the Reverend William Robinson,
the colonial commissary of the Bishop of London. Writing, on the 12th
of August, to his metropolitan, he gave an account of Patrick Henry's
very offensive management of the cause against the parsons, before
becoming a member of the House of Burgesses; and then added:--

"He has since been chosen a representative for one of the
counties, in which character he has lately distinguished
himself in the House of Burgesses on occasion of the arrival
of an act of Parliament for stamp duties, while the Assembly
was sitting. He blazed out in a violent speech against the
authority of Parliament and the king, comparing his majesty
to a Tarquin, a Caesar, and a Charles the First, and not
sparing insinuations that he wished another Cromwell would
arise. He made a motion for several outrageous resolves,
some of which passed and were again erased as soon as his
back was turned.... Mr. Henry, the hero of whom I have been
writing, is gone quietly into the upper parts of the country
to recommend himself to his constituents by spreading
treason and enforcing firm resolutions against the authority
of the British Parliament."[86]

Such was Patrick Henry's introduction to the upper spheres of English
society,--spheres in which his name was to become still better known
as time rolled on, and for conduct not likely to efface the impression
of this bitter beginning.

As to his reputation in the colonies outside of Virginia, doubtless
the progress of it, during this period, was slow and dim; for the
celebrity acquired by the resolutions of 1765 attached to the colony
rather than to the person. Moreover, the boundaries of each colony, in
those days, were in most cases the boundaries likewise of the personal
reputations it cherished. It was not until Patrick Henry came
forward, in the Congress of 1774, upon an arena that may be called
national, that his name gathered about it the splendor of a national
fame. Yet, even before 1774, in the rather dull and ungossiping
newspapers of that time, and in the letters and diaries of its public
men, may be discovered an occasional allusion showing that alrea