Page:Sketches of the life and character of Patrick Henry.djvu/427

Rh desire for accumulation, he was charged with wringing from the hands of his clients, and more particularly those of the criminals whom he defended, fees rather too exorbitant. He was censured too, for an attempt to locate the shores of the Chesapeake, which had theretofore been used as a public common, although there was at that time, no law of the state which protected them from location. In one of his earlier purchases of land, he was blamed also for having availed himself of the existing laws of the state, in paying for it in the depreciated paper currency of the country, nor was he free from censure on account of some participation which he is said to have had in the profits of the Yazoo trade. He was accused too, of having been rather more vain of his wealth, towards the close of his life, than became a man so great in other respects. Let these things be admitted, and "let the man who is without fault cast the first stone." In mitigation of these charges, if they be true, it ought to be considered that Mr. Henry had been during the greater part of his life, intolerably oppressed by poverty and all its distressing train of consequences; that the family for which he had to provide was very large; and that the bar, although it has been called the road to honour, was not in those days, the road to wealth. With these considerations in view, charity may easily pardon him for having considered only the legality of the means which he used to acquire an independence; and she can easily excuse him too, for having felt the success of his endeavours a little more sensibly than might have been becoming. He was certainly neither proud, or hard-hearted, or penurious: if he was either, there can be no reliance on human testimony; which represents him as being, in his general intercourse with the world, not only