should be noted, does not prove
illiteracy. If, indeed, such was his ordinary speech, and not, as some
have suggested, a manner adopted on particular occasions for the
purpose of identifying himself with the mass of his hearers, the fact
is evidence merely that he retained through his mature life, on the
one hand, some relics of an old-fashioned good usage, and, on the
other, some traces of the brogue of the district in which he was born,
just as Edmund Pendleton used to say "scaicely" for scarcely, and as
John Taylor, of Caroline, would say "bare" for bar; just as Thomas
Chalmers always retained the brogue of Fifeshire, and Thomas Carlyle
that of Ecclefechan. Certainly a brogue can never be elegant, but as
it has many times coexisted with very high intellectual cultivation,
its existence in Patrick Henry does not prove him to have been
uncultivated.

Then, too, it must be remembered that he himself had a habit of
depreciating his own acquaintance with books, and his own dependence
on them. He did this, it would seem, partly from a consciousness that
it would only increase his hold on the sympathy and support of the
mass of the people of Virginia if they should regard him as absolutely
one of themselves, and in no sense raised above them by artificial
advantages. Moreover, this habit of self-depreciation would be brought
into play when he was in conversation with such professed devourers of
books as John Adams and Jefferson, compared with whom he might very
properly feel an unfeigned conviction that he was no reader at all,--a
conviction in which they would be quite likely to agree with him, and
which they would be very likely to express. Thus, John Adams mentions
that, in the first intimacy of their friendship begun at the Congress
of 1774, the Virginian orator, at his lodgings, confessed one night
that, for himself, he had "had no public education;" that at fifteen
he had "read Virgil and Livy," but that he had "not looked into a
Latin book since."[8] Upon Jefferson, who of course knew Henry far
longer and far more closely, the impression of his disconnection from
books seems to have been even more decided, especially if we may
accept the testimony of Jefferson's old age, when his memory had taken
to much stumbling, and his imagination even more to extravagance than
in his earlier life. Said Jefferson, in 1824, of his ancient friend:
"He was a man of very little knowledge of any sort. He read nothing,
and had no book