his career, Williamsburg was the capital
of the colony,--the official residence of its governor, the place of
assemblage for its legislature and its highest courts, and, at certain
seasons of the year, the scene of no little vice-regal and provincial
magnificence.

Thither our Patrick had gone in 1760 to get permission to be a lawyer.
Thither he now goes once more, in 1764, to give some proof of his
quality in the profession to which he had been reluctantly admitted,
and to win for himself the first of a long series of triumphs at the
colonial capital,--triumphs which gave food for wondering talk to all
his contemporaries, and long lingered in the memories of old men. Soon
after the assembling of the legislature, in the fall of 1764, the
committee on privileges and elections had before them the case of
James Littlepage, who had taken his seat as member for the county of
Hanover, but whose right to the seat was contested, on a charge of
bribery and corruption, by Nathaniel West Dandridge. For a day or two
before the hearing of the case, the members of the house had "observed
an ill-dressed young man sauntering in the lobby," apparently a
stranger to everybody, moving "awkwardly about ... with a countenance
of abstraction and total unconcern as to what was passing around him;"
but who, when the committee convened to consider the case of Dandridge
against Littlepage, at once took his place as counsel for the former.
The members of the committee, either not catching his name or not
recalling the association attaching to it from the scene at Hanover
Court House nearly a twelvemonth before, were so affected by his
rustic and ungainly appearance that they treated him with neglect and
even with discourtesy; until, when his turn came to argue the cause of
his client, he poured forth such a torrent of eloquence, and exhibited
with so much force and splendor the sacredness of the suffrage and the
importance of protecting it, that the incivility and contempt of the
committee were turned into admiration.[60] Nevertheless, it appears
from the journals of the House that, whatever may have been the
admiration of the committee for the eloquence of Mr. Dandridge's
advocate, they did not award the seat to Mr. Dandridge.

Such was Patrick Henry's first contact with the legislature of
Virginia,--a body of which he was soon to become a member, and over
which, in spite of the social prestige, the talents, and the envious
opposition of its o