h, with episodes of labor and of
leadership in the Virginia House of Delegates.

A little more than a fortnight after his descent from the governor's
chair, he was elected by the General Assembly as a delegate in
Congress.[312] It is not known whether he at any time thought it
possible for him to accept this appointment; but, on the 28th of the
following October, the body that had elected him received from him a
letter declining the service.[313] Moreover, in spite of all
invitations and entreaties, Patrick Henry never afterwards served in
any public capacity outside the State of Virginia.

During his three years in the governorship, he had lived in the palace
at Williamsburg. In the course of that time, also, he had sold his
estate of Scotchtown, in Hanover County, and had purchased a large
tract of land in the new county of Henry,--a county situated about two
hundred miles southwest from Richmond, along the North Carolina
boundary, and named, of course, in honor of himself. To his new estate
there, called Leatherwood, consisting of about ten thousand acres, he
removed early in the summer of 1779. This continued to be his home
until he resumed the office of governor in November, 1784.[314]

After the storm and stress of so many years of public life, and of
public life in an epoch of revolution, the invalid body, the
care-burdened spirit, of Patrick Henry must have found great
refreshment in this removal to a distant, wild, and mountainous
solitude. In undisturbed seclusion, he there remained during the
summer and autumn of 1779, and even the succeeding winter and
spring,--scarcely able to hear the far-off noises of the great
struggle in which he had hitherto borne so rugged a part, and of which
the victorious issue was then to be seen by him, though dimly, through
many a murky rack of selfishness, cowardice, and crime.

His successor in the office of governor was Thomas Jefferson, the
jovial friend of his own jovial youth, bound to him still by that
hearty friendship which was founded on congeniality of political
sentiment, but was afterward to die away, at least on Jefferson's
side, into alienation and hate. To this dear friend Patrick Henry
wrote late in that winter, from his hermitage among the eastward
fastnesses of the Blue Ridge, a remarkable letter, which has never
before been in print, and which is full of interest for us on account
of its impulsive and self-revealing words. Its tone of despondency,
almost