ng by his tongue? Why not be
a lawyer?

But before we follow him through the gates of that superb
profession,--gates which, after some preliminary creaking of the
hinges, threw open to him the broad pathway to wealth, renown,
unbounded influence,--let us stop a moment longer on the outside, and
get a more distinct idea, if we can, of his real intellectual outfit
for the career on which he was about to enter.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] _Byrd Manuscripts_, ii. 79, 80.

[2] I have from private sources information that Brougham was aware of
his relationship to Patrick Henry, and that in recognition of it he
showed marked attentions to a grand-nephew of Patrick Henry, the late
W. C. Preston, of South Carolina, when the latter was in England.
Moreover, in his _Life and Times_, i. 17, 18, Brougham declares that
he derived from his maternal ancestors the qualities which lifted him
above the mediocrity that had always attached to his ancestors on the
paternal side.

[3] Wirt, 3.

[4] In a letter to Wirt, in 1815, _Life of Henry_, 14, 15; also
_Writings of Jefferson_, vi. 487, 488, where the letter is given,
apparently, from the first draft.

CHAPTER II

WAS HE ILLITERATE?

Concerning the quality and extent of Patrick Henry's early education,
it is perhaps impossible now to speak with entire confidence. On the
one hand there seems to have been a tendency, in his own time and
since, to overstate his lack of education, and this partly, it may be,
from a certain instinctive fascination which one finds in pointing to
so dramatic a contrast as that between the sway which the great orator
wielded over the minds of other men and the untrained vigor and
illiterate spontaneity of his own mind. Then, too, it must be admitted
that, whatever early education Patrick Henry may have received, he
did, in certain companies and at certain periods of his life, rather
too perfectly conceal it under an uncouth garb and manner, and under a
pronunciation which, to say the least, was archaic and provincial.
Jefferson told Daniel Webster that Patrick Henry's "pronunciation was
vulgar and vicious," although, as Jefferson adds, this "was forgotten
while he was speaking."[5] Governor John Page "used to relate, on the
testimony of his own ears," that Patrick Henry would speak of "the
yearth," and of "men's naiteral parts being improved by larnin';"[6]
while Spencer Roane mentions his pronunciation of China as
"Cheena."[7] All this, however, it