land was so impressed by their
superiority that he walked over to the seat of one of his colleagues
and said: "We might as well go home; we are not able to legislate with
these men." But some days afterward, perhaps in the midst of the work
of the committee on the statutes affecting trade and commerce, the
same member was able to relieve himself by the remark: "Well, after
all, I find these are but men, and, in mere matters of business, but
very common men."[126]

It seems hardly right to pass from these studies upon the first
Continental Congress, and upon Patrick Henry's part in it, without
some reference to Wirt's treatment of the subject in a book which has
now been, for nearly three quarters of a century, the chief source of
public information concerning Patrick Henry. There is perhaps no other
portion of this book which is less worthy of respect.[127] It is not
only unhistoric in nearly all the very few alleged facts of the
narrative, but it does great injustice to Patrick Henry by
representing him virtually as a mere declaimer, as an ill-instructed
though most impressive rhapsodist in debate, and as without any claim
to the character of a serious statesman, or even of a man of affairs;
while, by the somewhat grandiose and melodramatic tone of some portion
of the narrative, it is singularly out of harmony with the real tone
of that famous assemblage,--an assemblage of Anglo-Saxon lawyers,
politicians, and men of business, who were probably about as practical
and sober-minded a company as had been got together for any manly
undertaking since that of Runnymede.

Wirt begins by convening his Congress one day too soon, namely, on the
4th of September, which was Sunday; and he represents the members as
"personally strangers" to one another, and as sitting, after their
preliminary organization, in a "long and deep silence," the members
meanwhile looking around upon each other with a sort of helpless
anxiety, "every individual" being reluctant "to open a business so
fearfully momentous." But

"in the midst of this deep and death-like silence, and just
when it was beginning to become painfully embarrassing, Mr.
Henry arose slowly, as if borne down by the weight of the
subject. After faltering, according to his habit, through a
most impressive exordium, in which he merely echoed back the
consciousness of every other heart in deploring his
inability to do justice to the occasion, he la