lates the energy of many cultivated minds, but it elevates out of common life innumerable individuals, who, in more tranquil periods, are lost to all but the duties and calls of physical existence. This is the admirable resource, with which Providence provides a family of its children, whom it designs to raise up into an independent and prosperous people. They are commonly doomed, through much tribulation, to enter into the heaven of liberty and right. An exceeding sharpness of oppression, either in principle or fact, must drive them to resistance; and strong agonies of privation, of effort, of perplexity, and of care must bind their wandering counsels and divided interests into a band of strength and fortitude. Their leaders must sacrifice all the calm enjoyments and safety of home, and embark on a most troubled ocean of affairs with the gibbet in view; the poor soldiers must march with bleeding feet over icebound fields of disaster; and all the ordinary paths of life must be shut up before the rising generations of both sexes. The great and almost fatal calamities of such a state of things are no doubt the immediate cause of that astonishing developement of energy, both in deed and counsel, which marks a great political crisis, and which marked our revolutionary era more signally perhaps than any other in history. It certainly would not have been in the power of all the cabinets and armies of Europe, at that period, to show more business talent of the first order, than was displayed in these then insignificant colonies. The honorable testimony which Lord Chatham bore to the character of the state papers, which came from Philadelphia, was equally due to our military organization, considering the poverty of our means, and to our diplomatic negotiations, considering our political weakness. Neither is it fair to set all this down to the mere redeeming influence of the purity and disinterestedness of character of the men of those days. That generation, like this, was human, was frail. We had parties; we had narrow interests; we had traitors. And the revolution was brought about by the steady, businesslike efficiency of a host of able men, formed by the exigency of the times, seizing with wonderful aptness the right way of doing things; struggling against all kinds of obstacles, and finally conquering, not as the heroes of romance do, by the interposition of miraculous power, but by the superiority of wisdom, fortitude, and resource.

If, in this harvest of great men, all parts of the country were not equally productive, none was signally barren; and the just

rights of none to the gratitude of posterity ought to be undervalued. Delicacy and generosity, moreover, require that the tribute of praise should be fully and handsomely bestowed, beyond the circle of State partialities, and that we should even exercise a patriotic curiosity in asking, who were great men in other States, that sat in council with our own fathers. The time is peculiarly appropriate for this exercise of liberality. The period of commemoration has now arrived; and every year is bringing forth some literary monument to distinguish revolutionary desert. Not to mention several less conspicuous works, the Life of Franklin by his Grandson, of Patrick Henry by Wirt; that of James Otis by Tudor, that of General Greene by Judge Johnson, that of Josiah Quincy Jun. by his Son, may all with various degrees of merit be named as most honorable memorials of the great men they respectively celebrate. Similar works, we understand, are in preparation to commemorate the character of Samuel Adams and his copatriot Gerry; and a life of Alexander Hamilton has long been impatiently looked for.

Among the works of this class, that which is now before us deserves very honorable mention; The Life of Richard Henry Lee by his Grandson. The short dedication of the work of itself establishes the right of the subject of it to immortality among men.

'To Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and Charles Carroll, surviving signers of the Declaration of Independence, the Memoir of the Life of Richard Henry Lee, the Mover of the resolution in Congress, on the seventh of June, 1776, “That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States," is most respectfully dedicated.'

What a motion! And what a triumph of modern civilization, that a measure like this, a proposal to sever an empire, to erect an independent government over a vast region, on a continent where the word of independence had never been uttered, should have been calmly brought forward and deliberated in parliamentary rule, like an ordinary political question. Henceforward let us despair of nothing desirable for humanity, merely because it is unheard of, in the former history of man. Let us turn to the history of this motion, and hope for the time when all the great interests of nations shall be not only moved and suggested, but pursued, matured, and adjusted by negotiation and friendly compromise, without the barbarous resort to arms.

We cannot better fulfil the task of taking a proper notice of

this work, than by compiling from it a brief account of the life and services, which it so ably commemorates.

Richard Henry Lee was the son of Thomas Lee, of Stratford, in the county of Westmoreland in Virginia, and was born on the twentieth day of January, 1732, being consequently about a month older than General Washington. His ancestors were among the first settlers of Virginia, one of them, Richard Lee, having emigrated from England in the reign of Charles the First. Thomas Lee, the father of Richard Henry, was one of the first of the leading men of the Atlantic colonies, who turned their attention to the extensive regions west of the Alleganies. Having employed an engineer of eminence from England to explore them, he, in conjunction with many others, under the name of the Ohio Company, took up an extensive tract of land on the Ohio river. The company never having obtained a patent from the Crown, their title was vacated at the Revolution. An anecdote related of the same person strongly illustrates his political foresight. He used to say, that he had no doubt America would declare herself independent of Great Britain, and that the seat of the new government would be near the little falls of the Potomac. So confident was he in this persuasion, that he acquired possession of large tracts of land around these falls, which till lately were in the possession of his descendants. Richard Henry Lee, like most of the young men of wealthy families, was sent home,' as it was called, that is, to England, for his education, and was placed in the Academy of Wakefield in Yorkshire. No particular accounts are given of his progress at school; but the style of his eloquence, in after life, shows him to have been well grounded in classical and general literature. He returned to Virginia at about the nineteenth year of his age, two years after the decease of his father, and took up his abode with an elder brother. Though he did not devote himself to any professional pursuit, he passed his time in extending his acquaintance with the higher branches of political and moral science, and particularly in the study of the constitution and laws of England and America. For the pursuit of these dignified studies, his father's well stored library afforded him ample facilities.

Honorable and seductive as this leisure was, he stood ready to leave it, at the first call of his country. The inroads of the French and Indians on the western frontier, in the seven years' war, called aloud, and at length successfully, for the in

terposition of England. In 1755, General Braddock was sent with a body of troops from England, to protect the defenceless settlements on the west. Upon the arrival of the General at Alexandria, volunteer companies of militia, which had been raised in the lower parts of Virginia, offered their services to him, to join the regular army in this hazardous service. Lee, the captain of one of these companies, was among the number that hastened to Alexandria, and there had the mortification to be contemptuously refused permission to enter the service. The General would accept the aid of none of the provincial troops. General Washington, who had two years before been employed as a special agent by the Governor of Virginia on a mission to the French Governor in the west, was attached to General Braddock as an aiddecamp.

Lee inherited from his ancestors the habit of punctuality and despatch in business. He was very early solicited to act as guardian of the estates of the children of his friends, and at the age of twentyfive, in capacity of justice of the peace, he distinguished himself as an active and leading member of the county court, a tribunal at that period of extensive jurisdiction. So distinguished was his usefulness in this sphere, that a petition was addressed to the Governor and Council, by several of the magistrates of the county, praying that his commission might be so antedated, that he might act as president of the court. The same year he was elected a member for Westmoreland to the House of Burgesses, and from this time to his death, a period of thirtythree years, he scarcely ceased for a moment, to be in the active and public service of his country. During the first years of his service in the House of Burgesses, he had to struggle against a diffidence, which he began to despair of ever being able to conquer. It was long before he could trust himself to engage in extemporaneous discussion. It is probable that more than one session passed, before he took any part in the debates. His first speech, as far as can be ascertained, was on a motion 'to lay so heavy a duty on the importation of slaves, as effectually to put an end to that iniquitous and disgraceful traffic, within the Colony of Virginia.' His speech on this subject was short and premeditated. It contains the strength of the argument against the slave trade, but does not appear to have produced a very decided conviction of the power of its author. This was yet to receive its developement.

Virginia was, at this period, like almost every other American

Colony, divided into two political parties. The one consisted of the large landholders, the owners of large numbers of slaves; the latter of the substantial yeomanry. The former lived in great splendor and luxury, imitating the mode of life of the English aristocracy, and by natural association inclined to their principles. Between this and the lower orders, or the popular party, there was but little social intercourse. Lee, it scarcely needs to be said, was of the latter class. An incidental conflict between the two parties, in the House of Burgesses, was the first occasion, which called out, in all its strength, the talent of Lee. Shortly after this first display, Mr Lee took the lead in exposing the defalcation of the treasurer of the Colony, a leader and pillar of the aristocratic party; and from this period his fame was established as a popular champion.

Here we cannot but interrupt the thread of our narrative to remark, that one of the happiest circumstances attending the struggle for our independence, was the very gradual manner, in which it was brought on. Even in the earlier periods of our colonial history (in some of the Colonies, and particularly in Massachusetts, in the very earliest), the struggle, which subsisted between the popular and court parties, was an admirable school of political gymnastics. It taught the patriots the habit and the boldness of discussion. This they had already acquired, when the shallow policy of Mr Grenville was broached in 1764. The eleven years that elapsed between this period and the commencement of the war, was another apprenticeship of political wisdom, skill, and courage; so that when the crisis came, it did not take the patriots by surprise. The incalculable worth of this training may be seen by the calamitous consequences of a want of it, in other nations struggling for freedom. The French revolution miscarried for want of this gradual education in the school of liberty. The new states in America have been doomed to a generation of bloodshed and horror, partly in consequence of the errors committed for want of political experience; and poor Greece is now held up to the world a mangled, quivering victim, a sacrifice to her own inexperience, not less perhaps than to the excusable barbarity of her masters, and the infernal* policy of her Christian neighbors.

On the passage of the act in 1764, declaratory of the right

*When it is remembered, that without Austrian transports, the Turkish armies could neither be conveyed to Greece nor fed there, we do not think the word in the text will be held too strong.