ページの画像
PDF
ePub

less than twenty minutes, they might be seen in every part of the house, on every bench, in every window, stooping forward from their stands, in deathlike silence; their features fixed in amazement and awe; all their senses listening and riveted upon the speaker, as if to catch the last strain of some heavenly visitant. The mockery of the clergy was soon turned into alarm; their triumph into confusion and despair; and at one burst of his rapid and overwhelming invective, they fled from the bench in precipitation and terror. As for the father, such was his surprise, such his amazement, such his rapture, that, forgetting where he was, and the character which he was filling, tears of ecstacy streamed down his cheeks, without the power or inclination to repress them.

"The jury seem to have been so completely bewildered, that they lost sight, not only of the act of seventeen hundred and forty-eight, but that of seventeen hundred and fifty-eight also; for thoughtless even of the admitted right of the plaintiff, they had scarcely left the bar, when they returned with a verdict of one penny damages. A motion was made for a new trial; but the court, too, had now lost the equipoise of their judgment, and overruled the motion by a unanimous vote. The verdict and judgment overruling the motion, were followed by redoubled acclamations, from within and without the house.

"The people, who had with difficulty kept their hands off their champion, from the moment of closing his harangue, no sooner saw the fate of the cause finally sealed, than they seized him at the bar, and in spite of his own exertions, and the continued cry of 'order' from the sheriff's and the court, they bore him out of the court-house, and raising him on their shoulders, carried him about the yard, in a kind of electioneering triumph.

"O! what a scene was this for a father's heart! so sudden; so unlooked for; so delightfully overwhelming! At

the time, he was not able to give utterance to any sentiment; but, a few days after, when speaking of it to Mr. Winston (the present Judge Winston), he said, with the most engaging modesty, and with a tremor of voice which showed how much more he felt than he expressed, 'Patrick spoke in this cause near an hour, and in a manner that surprised me! and showed himself well-informed on a subject, of which I did not think he had any knowledge!'

"I have tried much to procure a sketch of this celebrated speech. But those of Mr. Henry's hearers who survive, seem to have been bereft of their senses. They can only tell you, in general, that they were taken captive; and so delighted with their captivity, that they followed implicitly, withersoever he led them: that, at his bidding, their tears flowed from pity, and their cheeks flushed with indignation: that when it was over, they felt as if they had just awaked from some ecstatic dream, of which they were unable to recall or connect the particulars. It was such a speech as they believe had never before fallen from the lips of man; and to this day, the old people of that county can not conceive that a higher compliment can be paid to a speaker, than to say of him, in their own homely phrase:- He is almost equal to Patrick, when he plead against the parsons.'”*

The eloquence of Mr. Henry on this occasion struck the people with amazement, and gained for him the most enthusiastic applause. He was now regarded as one of the greatest orators of his country — rising suddenly to the summit of universal renown. "His sun had risen," says Mr. Wirt," with a splendor which had never before been witnessed in this colony; and never afterward did it disgrace this glorious rising." Such was the effect of Mr. Henry's eloquence on its first display, and yet a nobler triumph awaited him.

* Sketches of the Life and Character of Patrick Henry.

The chief glory of Mr. Henry's career, was the part which he took in the American Revolution. This event he was undoubtedly the means of hastening. Thomas Jefferson declared that Mr. Henry certainly gave the first impulse to the ball of the revolution.

In January, 1765, the famous Stamp Act, was passed by the British Parliament. The storm of the Revolution which was soon to burst on the colonies, now began to thicken. At this crisis, Patrick Henry came forward to sound the alarm-to prepare his countrymen for the terrible approach-to arouse them to a sense of their duty, and to lead them to resist the aggressions of the British Government.

In the month of May, 1765, Mr. Henry was elected a member of the house of burgesses, and now the first notes of his lofty, patriotic eloquence began to fall on the ear, and to animate the heart of a desponding nation. On a blank leaf of an old law book, "unadvised, and unassisted," he wrote the five famous resolutions of 1765, against the Stamp Act, and against the right of the British Parliament to tax the American colonies. On offering them to the House, they met with violent opposition.

66

"The debate," in the forcible language of Jefferson, was most bloody," but torrents of sublime, irresistible eloquence from Henry prevailed, and the resolutions were carried by a small majority. It was then that Mr. Henry put forth his great strength, seized, demolished, and tram pled under foot the arguments of his opponents. "The cords of argument, with which his adversaries frequently flattered themselves that they had bound him fast, became pack-threads in his hands. He burst them with as much ease as the unshorn Samsor did the bands of the Philistines. He seized the pillars of the temple, shook them terribly, and seemed to threaten his opponents with ruin. It was an incessant storm of lightning and thunder, which

struck them aghast. The faint-hearted gathered courage from his countenance, and cowards became heroes while they gazed upon his exploits."

His powers increased in proportion to the magnitude of his theme. His eloquence never assumed a loftier tone. He summoned all his energies for a terrible blow- a stroke that should be felt in the court of England, and resound through all time. At length it fell. It was on this evermemorable occasion that Henry electrified the house by a burst of intrepid eloquence unsurpassed in the annals of ancient or modern oratory.

"It was in the midst of this magnificent debate, while he was descanting on the tyranny of the obnoxious act, that he exclaimed in a voice of thunder, and with the look of a god:-' Cæsar had his Brutus - Charles the First, his Cromwell- and George the Third'*-(' Treason,' cried the speaker-Treason, treason!' echoed from every part of the house. It was one of those trying moments which is decisive of character. Henry faltered not for an instant; but rising to a loftier attitude, and fixing on the speaker an eye of the most determined fire, he finished his sentence with the firmest emphasis)-' may profit by their example. If this be treason, make the most of it.'"

On the 4th of September, 1774, the old Continental Congress met at Carpenters' Hall, Philadelphia. Among the delegates from Virginia, were Peyton Randolph, Richard Henry Lee, George Washington, Richard Bland, Benjamin Harrison, Edmund Pendleton, and Patrick Henry. A nobler set of men never assembled in any land to erect and display the proud standard of liberty. Here the patriotic eloquence of Mr. Henry shone in its purest luster. Here it burst forth with irresistible power. The long silence which followed on the organization of that

*If Philip of Macedon formed the character of Demosthenes, George III may be said to have moulded that of Patrick Henry.

august body was first broken by the thunders of Henry's undaunted oratory. "In the midst of this deep and deathlike silence, and just when it was beginning to become painfully embarrassing, Mr. Henry rose slowly, as if borne down by the weight of the subject. After faltering, according to his habit, through a most impressive exordium, in which he merely echoed back the consciousness of every other heart, in deploring his inability to do justice to the occasion, he launched gradually into a recital of the colonial wrongs. Rising, as he advanced, with the grandeur of his subject, and glowing at length with all the majesty and expectation of the occasion, his speech seemed more than that of mortal man.

"Even those who had heard him in all his glory, in the house of burgesses of Virginia, were astonished at the manner in which his talents seemed to swell and expand themselves, to fill the vaster theater in which he was now placed. There was no rant-no rhapsody-no labor of the understanding no straining of the voice-no confusion of the utterance. His countenance was erect - his eye, steady his action, noble-his enunciation, clear and firm — his mind poised on its center- his views of his subject comprehensive and great- and his imagination coruscating with a magnificence and a variety, which struck even that assembly with amazement and awe. He sat down amid murmurs of astonishment and applause; and as he had been before proclaimed the greatest orator of Virginia, he was now, on every hand, admitted to be the first orator of America."

On the 20th of March, 1775, the Virginia Convention of delegates assembled in the "Old Church "* at Richmond.

*"Hallowed are the associations connected with that venerable church in Richmond! Often has the writer sought its precincts alone, and pondered there on the scene when, within the walls yet standing, Henry, as the embodiment of the Revolution and all its sublime results, rose like one inspired, and de

« 前へ次へ »