temper, experience, judgment,--above all, integrity; a true
Roman spirit." Richard Bland is "a wary, old, experienced veteran at
the bar and in the senate; has something of the look of old musty
parchments, which he handleth and studieth much. He formerly wrote a
treatise against the Quakers on water-baptism." Washington "is a
soldier,--a warrior; he is a modest man; sensible; speaks little; in
action cool, like a bishop at his prayers." Pendleton "is an humble
and religious man, and must be exalted. He is a smooth-tongued
speaker, and, though not so old, may be compared to old Nestor,--

'Experienced Nestor, in persuasion skilled,
Words sweet as honey from his lips distilled.'"

But Patrick Henry "is a real half-Quaker,--your brother's
man,--moderate and mild, and in religious matters a saint; but the
very devil in politics; a son of thunder. He will shake the Senate.
Some years ago he had liked to have talked treason into the
House."[104]

Few of the members of this Congress had ever met before; and if all
had arrived upon the scene as late as did these three members from
Virginia, there might have been some difficulty, through a lack of
previous consultation and acquaintance, in organizing the Congress on
the day appointed, and in entering at once upon its business. In fact,
however, more than a week before the time for the first meeting, the
delegates had begun to make their appearance in Philadelphia;
thenceforward with each day the arrivals continued; by Thursday, the
1st of September, twenty-five delegates, nearly one half of the entire
body elected, were in town;[105] and probably, during all that week,
no day and no night had passed without many an informal conference
respecting the business before them, and the best way of doing it.

Concerning these memorable men of the first Continental Congress, it
must be confessed that as the mists of a hundred years of glorifying
oratory and of semi-poetic history have settled down upon them, they
are now enveloped in a light which seems to distend their forms to
proportions almost superhuman, and to cast upon their faces a gravity
that hardly belongs to this world; and it may, perhaps, help us to
bring them and their work somewhat nearer to the plane of natural
human life and motive, and into a light that is as the light of
reality, if, turning to the daily memoranda made at the time by one of
their number, we can see how merrily, after all, nay, with what
flo