"Bacon, like Moses, led us forth, at last: The barren wilderness he passed; Did on the very border stand Of the blest promised land; And from the mountain-top of his exalted wit, Saw it himself and showed us it." And yet Henry, like nearly all his illustrious fellow-laborers of freedom, sleeps in an undistinguished grave. At his death, party spirit denied to his memory the tokens of public admiration and regret, offered in that very legislature of which he had been the great light, and which, indeed, he had called into being. Since that sorry failure--for all faction should have been hushed over the body of a citizen and a man so admirable--no further notice has been taken of him; and he who merited a national monument, only less proud than that due to Washington himself, slumbers beneath an humble private one at Red Hill, the secluded residence where he died. But we turn to those personal particulars of this extraordinary man which are appropriate to the design of the present volume. Not a few of them will be found to involve important corrections of the received account of his early years, and a new view, therefore, of his genius and character. In that received account, his sole original biographer, Mr. Wirt--writing without any personal knowledge of him, and neglecting to consult the most obvious and authentic source of information, his four surviving sisters, ladies of condition and of remarkable intelligence--has fallen into the vulgar error, to which the peculiar position and fortunes of Mr. Henry at first gave rise, and which he afterwards, for warrantable political purposes, encouraged. When he suddenly burst out from complete obscurity, an unrivalled orator, a consummate politician, and snatched the control of legislation and of the public mind from the veteran, the college-bred, the wealthy and high-born leaders who had till then held it, the homeliness of dress which befitted his narrow circumstances, the humility of aspect and the simplicity of manners, which were unaffected traits of his disposition, naturally assigned him in the eyes of both those who were of it and of those who looked down upon it, to the plebeian class. It suited the envy of these, it delighted the admiration of those, to regard him--that unintelligible marvel of abilities, which had thus all at once effaced every thing else--as a mere child of the people. The really skilful, who understand intellectual prodigies and never refer them to ignorance or chance, must have seen at once, through the cloud in which he stood, a great and an enlightened understanding, too competent to a high and a complex public question, not to be strong in knowledge as well as faculties. The few cannot have mistaken him for that fabulous thing, an ignorant genius; for they must have seen in his commanding and complete eloquence the art, in his masterly measures the information, of one thoroughly trained, though in secret, to the business of swaying men's