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Updated: May 23, 2025
Among the pieces which left a permanent impression upon my mind I recall Wirt's description of the eloquent blind preacher to whom he listened in the forest wilderness of the Blue Ridge, a remarkable word-portrait, in which the very tones of the sightless speaker's voice seemed to be reproduced.
Fortunately, however, we are not left in this case to grope our way toward the truth amid the ruins of the confused and decaying memories of old men. Since Wirt's time, there have come to light the fee-books of Patrick Henry, carefully and neatly kept by him from the beginning of his practice, and covering nearly his entire professional life down to old age.
One of the enquiries in your letter, however, may be answered without an appeal to the memory. It is that respecting the question, Whether committees of correspondence originated in Virginia, or Massachusetts? on which you suppose me to have claimed it for Virginia; but certainly I have never made such a claim. The idea, I suppose, has been taken up from what is said in Wirt's history of Mr.
Miss Wirt's hands seemed to faint and wail and die in variations: again, and she went up with a savage clang and rush of trumpets, as if Miss Wirt was storming a breach; and although I knew nothing of music, as I sat and listened with my mouth open to this wonderful display, my CAFFY grew cold, and I wondered the windows did not crack and the chandelier start out of the beam at the sound of this earthquake of a piece of music.
But I looked in one of Miss Ponto's manuscript song-books and found five faults of French in four words; and in a waggish mood asking Miss Wirt whether Dante Algiery was so called because he was born at Algiers, received a smiling answer in the affirmative, which made me rather doubt about the accuracy of Miss Wirt's knowledge.
When, however, that great man, who loved not to send out calumnies into the world with his own name attached to them, came to inspect this portion of Wirt's manuscript, he was moved by his usual prudence to write such a letter as drew from Wirt the following consolatory assurance: "Your repose shall never be endangered by any act of mine, if I can help it.
He had never been even in a magistrate's court, but he had heard the legends and traditions of the advocates; had read that eminent fiction, Wirt's Life of Patrick Henry, and a volume of Charles Phillips's speeches, and had felt that strong inner going forth of the soul that yearned to find utterance in oversweeping speech.
"She'd beat the devil, by Jove!" the Captain said, in a rapture; and the Lieutenant, by way of beginning the conversation, agreeably asked Rebecca how she liked her new place. "My place?" said Miss Sharp, coolly, "how kind of you to remind me of it! It's a tolerably good place: the wages are pretty good not so good as Miss Wirt's, I believe, with your sisters in Russell Square.
It may be that, in its present lessened form, Wirt's account of the matter is the more correct one; but this is the proper place in which to mention one bit of direct testimony upon the subject, which, probably, was not known to Wirt.
Wirt himself does not mention whence he obtained his version; and all efforts to discover that version as a whole, in any writing prior to Wirt's book, have thus far been unsuccessful. These facts have led even so genial a critic as Grigsby to incline to the opinion that "much of the speech published by Wirt is apocryphal."
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