e letters
of Patrick Henry are witnesses to the fact and quality of real
intellectual cultivation: these are not the manuscripts of an
uneducated person. In penmanship, punctuation, spelling, syntax, they
are, upon the whole, rather better than the letters of most of the
great actors in our Revolution. But, aside from the mere mechanics of
written speech, there is in the diction of Patrick Henry's letters the
nameless felicity which, even with great natural endowments, is only
communicable by genuine literary culture in some form. Where did
Patrick Henry get such literary culture? The question can be answered
only by pointing to that painful drill in Latin which the book-hating
boy suffered under his uncle and his father, when, to his anguish,
Virgil and Livy detained him anon from the true joys of existence.

Wirt seems to have satisfied himself, on evidence carefully gathered
from persons who were contemporaries of Patrick Henry, that the latter
had received in his youth no mean classical education; but, in the
final revision of his book for publication, Wirt abated his statements
on that subject, in deference to the somewhat vehement assertions of
Jefferson. It may be that, in its present lessened form, Wirt's
account of the matter is the more correct one; but this is the proper
place in which to mention one bit of direct testimony upon the
subject, which, probably, was not known to Wirt. Patrick Henry is said
to have told his eldest grandson, Colonel Patrick Henry Fontaine, that
he was instructed by his uncle "not only in the catechism, but in the
Greek and Latin classics."[11] It may help us to realize something of
the moral stamina entering into the training which the unfledged
orator thus got that, as he related, his uncle taught him these maxims
of conduct: "To be true and just in all my dealings. To bear no malice
nor hatred in my heart. To keep my hands from picking and stealing.
Not to covet other men's goods; but to learn and labor truly to get my
own living, and to do my duty in that state of life unto which it
shall please God to call me."[12]

Under such a teacher Patrick Henry was so thoroughly grounded, at
least in Latin and Greek grammar, that when, long afterward, his
eldest grandson was a student in Hampden-Sidney College, the latter
found "his grandfather's examinations of his progress in Greek and
Latin" so rigorous that he dreaded them "much more than he did his
recitations to his professors."[1