Page:Sketches of the life and character of Patrick Henry.djvu/445

 This cant has had its day, and its propagators. Truth has set the subject to rights. Mr. Henry is alleged, by those who had the best opportunities of knowing him, to have been not inferior, either in pubhc or in private virtue, to any patriot of the revokition; and he was, confessedly superior to them all, in that combination of bold, hardy, adventurous, splendid, and solid qualifica- tions, which are so peculiarly fitted to revolutionary times.

" He left," says judge Winston, " no manuscripts.^' This was to have been expected. We have seen that he could not bear the labour of writing; nor, indeed, of that long continued, coherent, and methodical thinking, without which no successful composition, of any extent, can be produced. He thought, indeed, a great deal; but his thinking was too desultory and irregular to take the form of composition. His mind had never been disciplined to w ait upon his pen — it still moved on — and its prismatic beauties were as evanescent as they were beautiful. His imagination " bodied forth the forms of things'' much more rapidly, than his unpractised pen could " turn them to shapes;" and it is not improbable, that his own observation of the difference between the vigour with which he thought, and the comparative de- crepitude with which he wrote, disgusted him with his first attempts, and prevented their repetition.

Yet this habit which he had of thinking for himself, and looking directly at eveiy subject, with the natural eyes of his understanding, without using what has been called the spectacles of books, was perhaps of advantage to him, both as a statesman and an orator: as a states- man, it possibly exempted him from that common error of scientific theorists, of forcing resemblances between the present and some past historical era, and accommo-

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