racter. So far was he indeed from exhibiting any one prognostic of
this greatness, that every omen foretold a life at best, of mediocrity,
if not of insignificance. His person is represented as having been
coarse, his manners uncommonly awkward, his dress slovenly, his
conversation very plain, his aversion to study invincible, and his
faculties almost entirely benumbed by indolence. No persuasion could
bring him either to read or to work. On the contrary, he ran wild in the
forest like one of the _Aborigines_ of the country, and divided his life
between the dissipation and uproar of the chase, and the languor of
inaction.

His propensity to observe and comment upon the human character, was,
so far as I can learn, the only circumstance which distinguished him
advantageously from his youthful companions. This propensity seems to
have been born with him, and to have exerted itself instinctively, the
moment that a new subject was presented to his view. Its action was
incessant, and it became at length almost the only intellectual exercise
in which he seemed to take delight. To this cause, may be traced that
consummate knowledge of the human heart which he finally attained, and
which enabled him when he came upon the public stage, to touch the
springs of passion with a master hand, and to control the resolutions
and decisions of his hearers with a power almost more than mortal.

From what has been already stated, it will be seen how little education
had to do with the formation of this great man's mind. He was indeed a
mere child of nature, and nature seems to have been too proud and too
jealous of her work, to permit it to be touched by the hand of art. She
gave him Shakespeare's genius, and bade him, like Shakespeare, to depend
on that alone. Let not the youthful reader, however, deduce from the
example of Mr. Henry, an argument in favor of indolence, and the
contempt of study. Let him remember that the powers which surmounted the
disadvantage of those early habits, were such as very rarely appear upon
this earth. Let him remember, too, how long the genius even of Mr. Henry
was kept down, and hidden from the public view, by the sorcery of those
pernicious habits; through what years of poverty and wretchedness they
doomed him to struggle; and let him remember, that at length, when in
the zenith of his glory. Mr. Henry himself, had frequent occasions to
deplore the consequences of his early neglect of literature, and to
bew