3] Colonel Fontaine also states that
he was present when a certain French visitor, who did not speak
English, was introduced to Governor Henry, who did not speak French.
During the war of the Revolution and just afterwards a similar
embarrassment was not infrequent here in the case of our public men,
among whom the study of French had been very uncommon; and for many of
them the old colonial habit of fitting boys for college by training
them to the colloquial use of Latin proved to be a great convenience.
Colonel Fontaine's anecdote implies, what is altogether probable, that
Patrick Henry's early drill in Latin had included the ordinary
colloquial use of it; for he says that in the case of the visitor in
question his grandfather was able, by means of his early stock of
Latin words, to carry on the conversation in that language.[14]

This anecdote, implying Patrick Henry's ability to express himself
in Latin, I give for what it may be worth. Some will think it
incredible, and that impression will be further increased by the
fact that Colonel Fontaine names Albert Gallatin as the visitor
with whom, on account of his ignorance of English, the conversation
was thus carried on in Latin. This, of course, must be a mistake;
for, at the time of his first visit to Virginia, Gallatin could
speak English very well, so well, in fact, that he went to Virginia
expressly as English interpreter to a French gentleman who could not
speak our language.[15] However, as, during all that period,
Governor Henry had many foreign visitors, Colonel Fontaine, in his
subsequent account of that particular visitor, might easily have
misplaced the name without thereby discrediting the substance of his
narrative. Indeed, the substance of his narrative, namely, that he,
Colonel Fontaine, did actually witness, in the case of some foreign
visitor, such an exhibition of his grandfather's good early training
in Latin, cannot be rejected without an impeachment of the veracity
of the narrator, or at least of that of his son, who has recorded
the alleged incident. Of course, if that narrative be accepted as
substantially true, it will be necessary to conclude that the
Jeffersonian tradition of Patrick Henry's illiteracy is, at any
rate, far too highly tinted.

Thus far we have been dealing with the question of Patrick Henry's
education down to the time of his leaving school, at the age of
fifteen. It was not until nine years afterward that he began the stud