of Charles I, and in treating with the commander of Cromwell's squadron, in behalf of Virginia, as an "independent dominion." Its arms were subsequently quartered with those of England and its dependencies; and from hence it is said to have acquired the title of "Ancient Dominion." Many other of the ancestors of Lee, were distinguished for their public services, and their attachment to the interests of the province. It was a family of great talent and patriotism; and when the dissentions with the mother country began, its descendants proved themselves not unworthy of the name of their forefathers, and of hastening a consummation which their prophetic wisdom had foreseen as inevitable, in the progress of events, -the independence of America.* Our attention is confined, however, to the subject of these memoirs. After receiving a good school education in England, he pursued in retirement, on his return, the study of history, of the civilians, and of the laws and constitution of England and her colonies. He imbibed the influence of that unconquerable democratic spirit which has exhibited itself so often and so gloriously in their annals. The writings of Locke had shed a broad light on the path of inquiry, which was then opening. He was fond, too, of the great heroic poets, and of Shakspeare. The father of the former is, according to Horace, the best of philosophers; the latter is assuredly the sweetest of moralists. It has been with the highest pleasure that we have met with more than one veteran of the revolution, whose youth had been familiar with the pages of the classics; who had been inspired and refreshed during his toils with the noble imagery, the chivalrous morality, the practical precepts, and high associations, he was enabled to recall; and who in the evening of life, found a fund of enjoyment in the sterling treasures of the ancients. We have wondered what age would again produce men, from the culture of small farms, and of such seemingly imperfect educations, prepared to fill so ably the parts of captains and statesmen; and we have smiled at the wisdom of some speculators, who have denounced the poets of antiquity, not only as useless, but as anti-democratic!

*"An anecdote, related by a very old gentleman, who had been an intimate acquaintance of Thomas Lee, will put in a strong light his political foresight. He remembered having heard President Lee remark to one of his friends,' that he had no doubt this country would declare itself, in time, independent of Great Britain; and that the seat of its government would be located near the little falls of the Potomac river.' How nearly he came to the fact is remarkable. To evince the confidence he felt in his views, he took up large tracts of land around these falls, which, till lately, were in the possession of his descendants."-Note, Vol. I. p. 7.

Mr. Lee first appeared in a public situation, as captain of a volunteer corps, during the war with the French and their Indian allies. His services, and those of the provincials under him, were rejected by Braddock. He was soon after elected justice of the peace, and member of the house of burgesses. His first recorded effort in that assembly, gave a fair promise of the future career of one of the apostles of freedom. It was on a motion "to lay so heavy a duty on the importation of slaves, as effectually to put an end to that disgraceful and iniquitous traffic, within the colony of Virginia." The Colonial Senate was then divided into two parties, one of which espoused the interests of the large landholders, the other that of the yeomanry. To the interests of the latter Mr. Lee was attached; and circumstances soon brought him forward as an eloquent and powerful champion of the popular cause. Local controversies were soon, however, merged in the great question of resistance to unconstitutional oppression. The act of Parliament in 1764, declaring the propriety of imposing stamp duties, while it awakened jealousy of their rights in the people generally, seemed, to the more enlightened, the assumption of a principle which must end in tyranny or revolt. "Possibly," says Mr. Lee, in a letter written at the time, to a friend, "this step of the mother country, though intended to oppress and keep us low, in order to secure our dependence, may be subversive of this end. Poverty and oppression, among those whose minds are filled with ideas of British liberty, may introduce a virtuous industry, with a train of generous and manly sentiments, which, when in future they become supported by numbers, may produce a fatal resentment of parental care being converted into tyrannical usurpation." In the meeting of the Virginia Assembly, in the same year, he brought forward the subject; and his first public productions were the address to the King, memorial to the House of Lords, and remonstrance to the Commons, reported by the committee appointed on this occasion. Nor was his opposition to the pernicious tendency of the principles asserted by the Declaratory Act, and the Stamp Act itself, which followed in the ensuing Parliament, confined to mere rhetorical reprobation. An association was formed, of which he was a prominent member, whose avowed and determined purpose was to render the operation of the act nugatory. In pursuance of one of the articles agreed to by this association, he went with a company of light horse, of which he was Captain, to the house of a person who had accepted the office of collector of stamp-duties, and had declared his intention of clearing out a vessel with the detested paper.

This individual was compelled to produce his commission, and all the paper in his house, which were burnt in his presence; while he was obliged to swear, thenceforward never to promote the sale or use of the stamp paper. About this period, it is to be inferred from these memoirs, the acquaintance of Mr. Lee commenced with the "forest-born Demosthenes," the illustrious Patrick Henry. An intimacy ensued between these congenial spirits, which was terminated only by death, and disturbed by no dissonance of opinion. The only subject on which they ever differed, arose after the revolution, on the questions of paying debts due to British merchants, prior to the war, and of making paper money a legal tender. Mr. Lee took the high ground of morality, in both instances, against all doctrines of expediency or evasion.

The unconstitutional act of Parliament, which, like the first hiss of the fabled serpents, had awakened the infant Hercules of public opinion, was soon repealed; but with a salvo as to the right of taxation, without representation, which could not disarm the jealousy its passage had excited. In 1767, the act imposing a tax on tea, and the act requiring the colonial legislatures to provide for quartering part of the king's troops, with the consequent measures which were adopted to overawe the refractory provinces, called forth a general expression of opinion, and produced an interchange of sentiment and unity of action, among those who were to become the leading men of the country, the power of which was not dreamed of, in the philosophy of the short-sighted ministry of that day. The correspondence of Arthur Lee, the Virginian agent in Great Britain, with his brother, and of the latter with John Dickinson and Samuel Adams, as given in these volumes, is in the highest degree worthy of perusal. It possesses no common interest, as displaying the gradual development of feeling, and thought, and reasoning, among the master spirits of the time, cotemporary with the progress of events. The suspension of the legislative functions in New-York; the extraordinary courts organized in Rhode Island; and the closing of the harbour of Boston, were among the prominent features of that system of infatuation, which enforced the anticipation of a result, which a more equitable policy might, perhaps, have deferred for half a century. During the course of these occurrences, and their minor accompaniments of high-handed tyranny, and bold but unorganized resistance, it is a matter worthy of the intensest curiosity, to mark the private calculations of those intellectual men, whose judgments were to control, or, at least, to direct the mass of public opinion; and to read their thoughts and views, from the first expression of dissatisfaction in the

humble attitude of petition, to the solemn hour of the crisis, when the resolution was moved in Congress, by R. H. Lee, "that these united colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent states; and that all political connexion between them and the state of Great Britain, is, and ought to be, totally dissolved."

We can only refer our readers to these letters themselves, published with these memoirs; and must glance rapidly over the services of Mr. Lee, up to the period of the Declaration of Independence. He was regularly returned as a member of the House of Burgesses; and his biographer thinks that the original suggestion of corresponding committees in the several legislatures, as well as corresponding societies to protect the rights of the people in the several states, belongs to him. The first of these committees in the Virginia Assembly, was appointed in 1773, of which Mr. Lee was a member. The resolutions brought forward by him in that body, and adopted by them, in relation to the last usurpation of Parliament, had previously occasioned its dissolution by the Governor, as had happened before with the New-York legislature. The necessity of the other colonies making a common cause with New-York, was enforced with argument and eloquence by Mr. Lee in his letters and speeches. Among his political labours, however, it is worthy of notice, in passing, that the subject of internal improvement engaged the attention of his active mind. In the session of 1769, as chairman of a committee, he brought in a report on the subject of "opening and improving the navigation of the river Potomac, as far as Fort Cumberland, as it was then called." More than half a century has elapsed, and the accomplishment of this object is still a desideratum.

"The very object of Mr. Lee's report is, at this moment, likely to become a national one, and of incalculable benefit to a large portion of the country. It is believed that he was the first person who digested any plan of the kind, in this country; certainly the first who formed a plan for the improvement of the navigation of the Potomac river, as high up as Fort Cumberland."-p. 78.

In the first General Assembly of Virginia, which met in 1774, after the dissolution of the House of Burgesses, it was resolved to recommend to the colonies an immediate meeting of a General Congress, and deputies were chosen from Virginia.

"After several days had been spent in the examination of the credentials of the members, and in other preliminary arrangements, the House was at length completely and solemnly organised. The day on which it was to commence its deliberations arrived. It met, and a long and deep silence is said to have followed its organization.'* Patrick Henry was

*Life of Patrick Henry, p. 106.

the first speaker on this occasion. He was followed, says his biogragrapher, by Mr. Richard Henry Lee, who charmed the house with a different kind of eloquence. Chaste, classical, beautiful, his polished periods rolled along without effort, filling the ear with the most bewitching harmony, and delighting the mind with the most exquisite imagery.” p. 107.

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The exhibition of moral energy, as has been justly asserted by a philosophical poet, transcends, in sublimity, all the grandeur of the physical universe; but his illustration, drawn from the assassination committed by the younger Brutus, is but tame and unworthy, compared with the spectacle presented by that assemblage, where the fathers of our country 'sate in close divan,' to deliberate on the solemn question of establishing a new empire. When the mind grasps at once the interest of the moment, the magnitude of the territory that was to be wrested from the sway of England, and the ultimate influences on the political situation of other kingdoms, to which these consultations were to lead-there is more than enough to dilate, with kindling majesty,' the strongest conception.

The proceedings of this august body wore, however, for some time, an aspect of humility and negotiation, which ill suited the settled purpose, and, what might then have been deemed, enthusiastic views of Lee and Henry. At this day, however, we have reason to rejoice, that there was a coolness and temperance in those earlier councils, which gave dignity to resistance, while its necessity became obvious, and made the mother country wholly responsible for the premature occurrence of an inevitable issue. The same spirit, too, was transfused into the subsequent proceedings of the general legislature; and to its tone of moderation and firmness, America owes her unrivalled prosperity.

Our biographer vindicates, for Mr. Lee, the authorship of the petition to the king, reported by a committee, of which he was a member, in the Congress of 1774, which has been ascribed, heretofore, to the pen of Mr. Dickenson. This document, and the address to the people of England, as this writer justly observes, "cannot be too often read by the countrymen and descendants of their authors." The address to the Colonies, the composition, unquestionably, of Mr. Lee, is also a masterly exposition of the wrongs our countrymen had sustained, and the dangers that were before them. The address, which also was written by him in the Congress of 1775, to the inhabitants of Great Britain, breathes a spirit of manly eloquence, worthy of the cause which inspired it. Lord Chatham acknowledged the power of these appeals, and did justice in his private correspondence to their merits, while he paid a pub