eading spirits of the American Revolution. His father, John Henry,
a Scotchman, a cousin of the historian, William Robertson, had acquired
a small property in Virginia. Patrick was not exactly "forest born,"
but, as a child, loved to play truant "in the forest with his gun or
over his angle-rod." He first came into notice as an orator in the
"Parson's Cause," a suit brought by a minister of the Established Church
to recover his salary, which had been fixed at 16,000 lbs. of tobacco.
In his speech he is said to have struck the key-note of the Revolution
by arguing that "a king, by disallowing acts of a salutary nature, from
being the father of his people, degenerates into a tyrant, and forfeits
all right to his subjects' obedience." His famous speech against the
"Stamps Act" was delivered in the House of Burgesses of Virginia, May
29, 1765. One passage, with which, no doubt, Byron was familiar, has
passed into history. "Caesar had his Brutus--Charles the First had his
Cromwell--and George the Third--" Henry was interrupted with a shout of
"Treason! treason!!" but finished the sentence with, and "George the
Third _may profit by their example_. If _this_ be treason, make the most
of it."

Henry was delegate to the first Continental Congress, five times
Governor of Virginia, and was appointed U.S. Senator in 1794.

His contemporaries said that he was "the greatest orator that ever
lived." He seems to have exercised a kind of magical influence over his
hearers, which they could not explain, which charmed and overwhelmed
them, and "has left behind a tradition of bewitching persuasiveness and
almost prophetic sublimity."--See _Life of Patrick Henry_, by William
Wirt, 1845, _passim._]

[ek] {561} ----_to one Napoleon_.--[MS. erased.]

[el] ----_thy poor old wall forgets_.--[MS. erased.]

[311] ["I have been over Verona. The amphitheatre is wonderful--beats
even Greece. Of the truth of Juliet's story they seem tenacious to a
degree, insisting on the fact, giving a date (1303), and showing a tomb.
It is a plain, open, and partly decayed sarcophagus, with withered
leaves in it, in a wild and desolate conventual garden, once a cemetery,
now ruined to the very graves. The situation struck me as very
appropriate to the legend, being blighted as their love.... The Gothic
monuments of the Scaliger princes pleased me, but 'a poor virtuoso am
I.'"--Letter to Moore, November 7, 1816, _Letters_, 1899, iii. 386, 387.
The tombs of the S