Many a time--he wrote in 1808--have I asked myself, in the enthusiastic moment of the death of a fox, the victory of a favorite horse, the issue of a question eloquently argued at the bar, or in the great councils of the nation. Well, which of these kinds of reputation would I prefer? That of a horse jockey? a fox hunter? an orator? or the finest advocate of my country's rights?[7] What young man has not thus dreamed of serving his country and devoting himself to some noble cause, what student preparing for the bar has not pictured himself winning a difficult case, forcing the judge's attention and swaying a reluctant jury? The ambition to become an orator may have been awakened in his mind by the acquaintance he had made of the "uncultured Demosthenes" of the Old Dominion. In the winter of 1759-1760, he had met at the house of Mr. Dandrige, in Hanover, a tall, ascetic-looking fellow, rather disdainful of finery and careless in his wearing apparel, but "with such strains of native eloquence as Homer wrote in"--"I never heard anything that deserved to be called by the same name with what flowed from him," wrote Jefferson later, "and where he got that torrent of language is unconceivable. I have frequently shut my eyes while he spoke, and, when he was done, asked myself what he had said, without being able to recollect a word of it. He was no logician. He was truly a great man, however--one of enlarged views." His name was Patrick Henry. Far less uncultured than Jefferson's portrait would lead us to believe, related to very good families, although poor and a complete failure as a merchant, Patrick Henry had suddenly decided to enter the legal profession, and after borrowing a "Coke upon Littleton" and a "Digest of the Virginia Acts", he had appeared after six weeks' preparation before the board of examiners. He won his diploma through logic, clear presentation and common sense rather than through his knowledge of the law, and commenced practicing in the fall of the same year. Whenever a case appeared before the General Court sitting at Williamsburg and consisting of the Governor and his council, "he used to put up" with Jefferson, borrowing books which he seldom read, always ready with stories of the backwoods. Fame came to him soon after, when his fiery eloquence in the "parson's case" drew down upon him clerical hostility and public admiration. "Instead of feeding the hungry and clothing the naked," he cried out in the courtroom, "these religious harpies would, were their powers equal to their will, snatch from the hearth of their honest parishioner his last hoe-cake, from the widow and her orphan children their last milch cow, the last bed, nay, the last blanket, from the lying-in woman."[8] Not even in the days of the Convention did the halls of Paris echo with more vehement vituperations and more indignant denunciations. A magnetic power, an emotional appeal to elementary passion, to a sense of justice