importance of protecting it, that the incivility and contempt of the committee were turned into admiration.[60] Nevertheless, it appears from the journals of the House that, whatever may have been the admiration of the committee for the eloquence of Mr. Dandridge's advocate, they did not award the seat to Mr. Dandridge. Such was Patrick Henry's first contact with the legislature of Virginia,--a body of which he was soon to become a member, and over which, in spite of the social prestige, the talents, and the envious opposition of its old leaders, he was promptly to gain an ascendancy that constituted him, almost literally, the dictator of its proceedings, so long as he chose to hold a place in it. On the present occasion, having finished the somewhat obscure business that had brought him before the committee, it is probable that he instantly disappeared from the scene, not to return to it until the following spring, when he came back to transact business with the House itself. For, early in May, 1765, a vacancy having occurred in the representation for the county of Louisa, Patrick Henry, though not then a resident in that county, was elected as its member. The first entry to be met with in the journals, indicating his presence in the House, is that of his appointment, on the 20th of May, as an additional member of the committee for courts of justice. Between that date and the 1st of June, when the House was angrily dissolved by the governor, this young and very rural member contrived to do two or three quite notable things--things, in fact, so notable that they conveyed to the people of Virginia the tidings of the advent among them of a great political leader, gave an historic impulse to the series of measures which ended in the disruption of the British Empire, and set his own name a ringing through the world,--not without lively imputations of treason, and comforting assurances that he was destined to be hanged.