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 [Pg 34] 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 had. Moreover, in trying to form a just idea of Patrick Henry, it is never safe to forget that we have to do with a man of genius, and that the ways by which a man of genius reaches his results are necessarily his own,—are often invisible, are always somewhat mysterious, to the rest of us. The genius of Patrick Henry was powerful, intuitive, swift; by a glance of the eye he could take in what an ordinary man might spend hours in toiling for; his memory held [Pg 35] whatever was once committed to it; all his resources were at instant command; his faculty for debate, his imagination, humor, tact, diction, elocution, were rich and exquisite; he was also a man of human and friendly ways, whom all men loved, and whom all men wanted to help; and it would not have been strange if he actually fitted himself for the successful practice of such law business as was then to be had in Virginia, and actually entered upon its successful practice with a quickness the exact processes of which were unperceived even by his nearest neighbors.
FOOTNOTES:
[18] Wirt, 16.
[19] Curtis, Life of Webster, i. 584.
[20] First printed in the Philadelphia Age, in 1867; and again printed, from the original manuscript, in The Historical Magazine, August, 1867, 90-93. I quote from the latter.
[21] Jefferson’s memorandum, Hist. Mag. for August, 1867, 90.
[22] Wirt, 16, 17.
[23] Curtis, Life of Webster, i. 584.
[24] McMaster, Hist. of U. S. i. 489.
[25] I have carefully examined this testimony, which is still in manuscript.