[310] [Patrick Henry, born May 29, 1736, died June 6, 1799, was one of the leading spirits of the American Revolution. His father, John Henry, a Scotchman, a cousin of the historian, William Robertson, had acquired a small property in Virginia. Patrick was not exactly "forest born," but, as a child, loved to play truant "in the forest with his gun or over his angle-rod." He first came into notice as an orator in the "Parson's Cause," a suit brought by a minister of the Established Church to recover his salary, which had been fixed at 16,000 lbs. of tobacco. In his speech he is said to have struck the key-note of the Revolution by arguing that "a king, by disallowing acts of a salutary nature, from being the father of his people, degenerates into a tyrant, and forfeits all right to his subjects' obedience." His famous speech against the "Stamps Act" was delivered in the House of Burgesses of Virginia, May 29, 1765. One passage, with which, no doubt, Byron was familiar, has passed into history. "Cæsar had his Brutus—Charles the First had his Cromwell—and George the Third—" Henry was interrupted with a shout of "Treason! treason!!" but finished the sentence with, and "George the Third may profit by their example. If this be treason, make the most of it."
Henry was delegate to the first Continental Congress, five times Governor of Virginia, and was appointed U.S. Senator in 1794.
His contemporaries said that he was "the greatest orator that ever lived." He seems to have exercised a kind of magical influence over his hearers, which they could not explain, which charmed and overwhelmed them, and "has left behind a tradition of bewitching persuasiveness and almost prophetic sublimity."—See Life of Patrick Henry, by William Wirt, 1845, passim.]
[ek] {561} ——to one Napoleon.—[MS. erased.]
[el] ——thy poor old wall forgets.—[MS. erased.]
[311] ["I have been over Verona. The amphitheatre is wonderful—beats even Greece. Of the truth of Juliet's story they seem tenacious to a degree, insisting on the fact, giving a date1303, and showing a tomb. It is a plain, open, and partly decayed sarcophagus, with withered leaves in it, in a wild and desolate conventual garden, once a cemetery, now ruined to the very graves. The situation struck me as very appropriate to the legend, being blighted as their love.... The Gothic monuments of the Scaliger princes pleased me, but 'a poor virtuoso am I.'"—Letter to Moore, November 7, 1816, Letters, 1899, iii. 386, 387. The tombs of the Scaligers are close to the Church of Santa Maria l'Antica. Juliet's tomb, "of red Verona marble," is in the garden of the Orfanotrofio, between the Via Cappucini and the Adige. It is not "that ancient vault where all the kindred of the Capulets lie," which has long since been destroyed. Since 1814 Verona had been under Austria's sway, and had "treacherously" forgotten her republican traditions.]
[312] {562}[Francesco Can Grande della Scala died in 1329. It was under his roof that Dante learned
"... how salt his food who fares
Upon another's bread—how steep his path
Who treadeth up and down another's stairs."