the great Chief Justice; and after Wythe had become Chancellor of Virginia Henry Clay served him as secretary. But Jefferson was Wythe's favourite pupil, and to Jefferson he left his valuable library. Wythe is said to have been eccentric, possibly because he carried the religion of humanity from the region of the abstract into personal practice. During his lifetime he emancipated all his slaves and made provision for their subsistence. In Jefferson's character of his "beloved mentor" no blemishes appear. So inflexible was his integrity, so warm his patriotism, such his devotion to liberty and to the natural rights of man that he might be called the Virginian Cato but for a disinterested liberality which contrasted with the avarice of the Roman. Called to the Bar of the General Court he soon to quote Jefferson became first in his profession by virtue of superior learning, elocution, and logic:

"In pleading he never indulged himself with a useless or declamatory thought or word - and became as distinguished by correctness and purity of conduct in his profession, as he was by his industry and fidelity to those who employed him. He was early elected to the House of Burgesses, and continued in it till the Revolution. On the first dawn of that, instead of higgling on halfway principles, as others did who feared to follow their reason, he took his stand on the solid ground that the only link of political union between us and Great Britain was the identity of our executive; and that the nation and its parliament had no more authority over us than we had over them, and that we were coordinate nations with Great Britain and Hanover."

There had always been democratic elements in Virginia, though the rich planters of the Colony usually supported Church and King. Revolutionary principles had flamed up as early as 1675 in Bacon's Rebellion, and Wythe's teaching laid the intellectual basis of a school to which Patrick Henry's eloquence soon lent fire and force. So by

degrees the school became a party, and the party helped to found a nation. Before Jefferson had been long in Chambers a trial of strength took place between the dissenters and the State Church, which gave Patrick Henry an opportunity of coming forward as a village Hampden, while Jefferson played the more obscure part of Selden. The clergy of the Established Church of Virginia received their stipends in tobacco. In 1758 the Virginian Assembly passed the so-called Twopenny Act under which salaries were to be paid, not in pounds of tobacco, but in pence at the very low rate of two pence per pound of tobacco. The clergy were naturally indignant and their diocesan, the Bishop of London, supported them. The Governor approved the Act; but after a war of words and pamphlets King George the Third's Privy Council disallowed it, on the ground that the clergy were entitled to the tobacco or its market price. In 1763 a parson in Hanover county brought suit to recover his salary of 16,000 pounds of tobacco. By the ruling of the Court the parson could recover; but the amount was left to the jury. Under these circumstances Patrick Henry was employed to go into Court and harangue the jury. It was his first important appearance. Popular feeling ran high against royalty and the royal church. At the outset Henry stammered, awkward and embarrassed. But after a few moments natural eloquence, fired by Presbyterian zeal, found passionate utterance. His bold and scathing denunciations of the clergy drove them in a flutter from the crowded court house. Even royalty was roughly handled. The King, he cried, by upholding the claims of the parsons against the people of Virginia, and vetoing the Act of their Legislature, had forfeited all claim to obedience. When plaintiff's counsel charged that "the

Gentleman has spoken treason," Patrick Henry only grew more audacious and extravagant. Amid a scene of wild excitement and commotion the jury after consulting five minutes found a verdict of one penny for the plaintiff. Loud was the applause. The King's authority had been challenged, and diminished, in the King's Court of Justice. Patrick Henry was carried from the Court in triumph on the shoulders of a cheering crowd- probably to the lodgings of his young friend Jefferson.

When Jefferson came to found a liberal University, he discovered, as Milton had done, that New Presbyter was but Old Priest writ large. The intolerance of the Presbyterians proved a more formidable obstacle to enlightenment than the indifference of the Anglican Clergy. But at this time the Presbyterians were supporting the disestablishment of a rival sect. Jefferson's notes on the Parson's Case have probably perished. But an extract from his Common-Place book in the following year (1764) proves the thoroughness with which he examined the historical connection of law and religion. It was made by Jefferson in 1814 in a letter to his friend Thomas Cooper, a theoretical lawyer, who had suffered for his liberal opinions during the American Reign of Terror. "When I was a student of law," wrote Jefferson, "now half a century ago, after getting through Coke on Littleton, whose matter cannot be abridged, I was in the habit of abridging and common-placing what I read meriting it, and of sometimes mixing my own reflections on the subject. I now enclose you the extract from these entries which I promised. They were written at the time of life when I was bold in the pursuit of knowledge, never fearing to follow truth and reason to whatever results they led, and bearding every authority which stood in their way. This