s."[9]

On the other hand, there are certain facts concerning Henry's early
education and intellectual habits which may be regarded as pretty
well established. Before the age of ten, at a petty neighborhood
school, he had got started upon the three primary steps of knowledge.
Then, from ten to fifteen, whatever may have been his own irregularity
and disinclination, he was member of a home school, under the
immediate training of his father and his uncle, both of them good
Scotch classical scholars, and one of them at least a proficient in
mathematics. No doubt the human mind, especially in its best estate of
juvenile vigor and frivolity, has remarkable aptitude for the
repulsion of unwelcome knowledge; but it can hardly be said that even
Patrick Henry's gift in that direction could have prevented his
becoming, under two such masters, tolerably well grounded in Latin, if
not in Greek, or that the person who at fifteen is able to read Virgil
and Livy, no matter what may be his subsequent neglect of Latin
authors, is not already imbued with the essential and indestructible
rudiments of the best intellectual culture.

It is this early initiation, on the basis of a drill in Latin, into
the art and mystery of expression, which Patrick Henry received from
masters so competent and so deeply interested in him, which helps us
to understand a certain trait of his, which puzzled Jefferson, and
which, without this clue, would certainly be inexplicable. From his
first appearance as a speaker to the end of his days, he showed
himself to be something more than a declaimer,--indeed, an adept in
language. "I have been often astonished," said Jefferson, "at his
command of proper language; how he obtained the knowledge of it I
never could find out, as he read little, and conversed little with
educated men."[10] It is true, probably, that we have no perfect
report of any speech he ever made; but even through the obvious
imperfections of his reporters there always gleams a certain
superiority in diction,--a mastery of the logic and potency of fitting
words; such a mastery as genius alone, without special training,
cannot account for. Furthermore, we have in the letters of his which
survive, and which of course were generally spontaneous and quite
unstudied effusions, absolutely authentic and literal examples of his
ordinary use of words. Some of these letters will be found in the
following pages. Even as manuscripts, I should insist that th