these two men are said to have
made their mark there, were speeches on mere rules of the House
relating to methods of procedure.[129]

Since the death of Wirt, and the publication of the biography of him
by Kennedy, it has been possible for us to ascertain just how the
genial author of "The Life and Character of Patrick Henry" came to be
so gravely misled in this part of his book. "The whole passage
relative to the first Congress" appears to have been composed from
data furnished by Jefferson, who, however, was not a member of that
Congress; and in the original manuscript the very words of Jefferson
were surrounded with quotation marks, and were attributed to him by
name. When, however, that great man, who loved not to send out
calumnies into the world with his own name attached to them, came to
inspect this portion of Wirt's manuscript, he was moved by his usual
prudence to write such a letter as drew from Wirt the following
consolatory assurance:--

"Your repose shall never be endangered by any act of mine,
if I can help it. Immediately on the receipt of your last
letter, and before the manuscript had met any other eye, I
wrote over again the whole passage relative to the first
Congress, omitting the marks of quotation, and removing your
name altogether from the communication."[130]

The final adjournment of the first Continental Congress, it will be
remembered, did not occur until its members had spent together more
than seven weeks of the closest intellectual intimacy. Surely, no mere
declaimer however enchanting, no sublime babbler on the rights of man,
no political charlatan strutting about for the display of his
preternatural gift of articulate wind, could have grappled in keen
debate, for all those weeks, on the greatest of earthly subjects, with
fifty of the ablest men in America, without exposing to their view all
his own intellectual poverty, and without losing the very last shred
of their intellectual respect for him. Whatever may have been the
impression formed of Patrick Henry as a mere orator by his associates
in that Congress, nothing can be plainer than that those men carried
with them to their homes that report of him as a man of extraordinary
intelligence, integrity, and power, which was the basis of his
subsequent fame for many years among the American people. Long
afterward, John Adams, who formed his estimate of Patrick Henry
chiefly from what he saw of him in tha