t, was not lazy, and had no
inordinate fondness for deer-hunting. It happens that young Thomas
Jefferson himself was just such a lawyer. He began practice exactly
seven years after Patrick Henry, and at precisely the same time of
life, though under external circumstances far more favorable. As a
proof of his uncommon zeal and success in the profession, his
biographer, Randall, cites from Jefferson's fee-books the number of
cases in which he was employed until he was finally drawn off from the
law into political life. Oddly enough, for the first four years of his
practice, the cases registered by Jefferson[31] number, in all, but
504. It should be mentioned that this number, as it includes only
Jefferson's cases in the General Court, does not indicate all the
business done by him during those first four years; and yet, even with
this allowance, we are left standing rather helpless before the
problem presented by the fact that this competent and diligent young
lawyer--whom, forsooth, the rustling leaves of the forest could never
for once entice from the rustle of the leaves of his law-books--did
nevertheless transact, during his own first four years of practice,
probably less than one half as much business as seems to have been
done during a somewhat shorter space of time by our poor, ignorant,
indolent, slovenly, client-shunning and forest-haunting Patrick.

But, if Jefferson's charge of professional indolence and neglect on
the part of his early friend fares rather ill when tested by those
minute and plodding records of his professional employments which were
kept by Patrick Henry, a fate not much more prosperous overtakes
Jefferson's other charge,--that of professional incompetence. It is
more than intimated by Jefferson that, even had Patrick been disposed
to engage in a general law practice, he did not know enough to do so
successfully by reason of his ignorance of the most ordinary legal
principles and legal forms. But the intellectual embarrassment which
one experiences in trying to accept this view of Patrick Henry arises
from the simple fact that these incorrigible fee-books show that it
was precisely this general law practice that he did engage in, both in
court and out of court; a practice only a small portion of which was
criminal, the larger part of it consisting of the ordinary suits in
country litigation; a practice which certainly involved the drawing
of pleadings, and the preparation of many sorts of lega