l papers; a
practice, moreover, which he seems to have acquired with extraordinary
rapidity, and to have maintained with increasing success as long as he
cared for it. These are items of history which are likely to burden
the ordinary reader with no little perplexity,--a perplexity the
elements of which are thus modestly stated by a living grandson of
Patrick Henry: "How he acquired or retained a practice so large and
continually increasing, so perfectly unfit for it as Mr. Jefferson
represents him, I am at a loss to understand."[32]

As we go further in the study of this man's life, we shall have before
us ample materials for dealing still further and still more definitely
with the subject of his professional character, as that character
itself became developed and matured. Meantime, however, the evidence
already in view seems quite enough to enable us to form a tolerably
clear notion of the sort of lawyer he was down to the end of 1763,
which may be regarded as the period of his novitiate at the bar. It is
perfectly evident that, at the time of his admission to the bar, he
knew very little of the law, either in its principles or in its forms:
he knew no more than could have been learned by a young man of genius
in the course of four weeks in the study of Coke upon Littleton, and
of the laws of Virginia. If, now, we are at liberty to suppose that
his study of the law then ceased, we may accept the view of his
professional incompetence held up by Jefferson; but precisely that is
what we are not at liberty to suppose. All the evidence, fairly
sifted, warrants the belief that, on his return to Hanover with his
license to practice law, he used the next few months in the further
study of it; and that thenceforward, just so fast as professional
business came to his hands, he tried to qualify himself to do that
business, and to do it so well that his clients should be inclined to
come to him again in case of need. Patrick Henry's is not the first
case, neither is it the last one, of a man coming to the bar miserably
unqualified for its duties, but afterward becoming well qualified. We
need not imagine, we do not imagine, that he ever became a man of
great learning in the law; but we do find it impossible to believe
that he continued to be a man of great ignorance in it. The law,
indeed, is the one profession on earth in which such success as he is
proved to have had, is impossible to such incompetence as he is said
to have h