house, in circumstances so perilous to the solitary wife. This appeal to the sensibility of husbands--and he knew that all the jury stood in this relation--was overwhelming. If the verdict could have been rendered immediately after this burst of the pathetic, every man, at least every husband, in the house, would have been for rejecting Harvey's testimony, if not for hanging him forthwith."[431] A very critical and cool-headed witness respecting Patrick Henry's powers as an advocate was Judge Spencer Roane, who presided in one of the courts in which the orator was much engaged after his return to the bar in 1786:-- "When I saw him there," writes Judge Roane, "he must necessarily have been very rusty; yet I considered him as a good lawyer.... It was as a criminal lawyer that his eloquence had the finest scope.... He was a perfect master of the passions of his auditory, whether in the tragic or the comic line. The tones of his voice, to say nothing of his matter and gesture, were insinuated into the feelings of his hearers, in a manner that baffled all description. It seemed to operate by mere sympathy, and by his tones alone it seemed to me that he could make you cry or laugh at pleasure. Yet his gesture came powerfully in aid, and, if necessary, would approach almost to the ridiculous.... I will try to give some account of his tragic and comic effect in two instances that came before me. About the year 1792, one Holland killed a young man in Botetourt.... Holland had gone up from Louisa as a schoolmaster, but had turned out badly, and was very unpopular. The killing was in the night, and was generally believed to be murder.... At the instance of the father and for a reasonable fee, Mr. H. undertook to go to Greenbrier court to defend Holland. Mr. Winston and myself were the judges. Such were the prejudices there, as I was afterwards informed by Thomas Madison, that the people there declared that even Patrick Henry need not come to defend Holland, unless he brought a jury with him. On the day of the trial the court-house was crowded, and I did not move from my seat for fourteen hours, and had no wish to do so. The examination took up a great part of the time, and the lawyers were probably exhausted. Breckenridge was eloquent, but Henry left no dry eye in the court-house. The case, I believe, was murder, though, possibly, manslaughter only; and Henry laid hold of this possibility with such effect as to make all forget that Holland had killed the storekeeper, and presented the deplorable case of the jury's killing Holland, an innocent man. He also presented, as it were, at the clerk's table, old Holland and his wife, who were then in Louisa, and asked what must be the feeling of