Brown, John Marshall, Bushrod Washington and John Wickham. So great was the reputation of Mr. Wythe that he was made chairman of the committee, although among its members were a future associate justice and chief justice of the United States. Mr. Jefferson loaned to Mr. Wythe, to whom he was much devoted, his collection of printed Acts, which was the largest in the State, and the work was begun, but there was a disagree ment between the committee and the legisla ture as to what was to be included, so it was not finished. It would have been a valuable work and would have made the labor of later years in collecting and arranging the laws much easier. Priestley truly says : " The laws of a country are necessarily connected with everything belonging to the people of it, so that a thorough knowledge of them and their progress would inform us of every thing that was most useful to be known about them, and one of the greatest imper fections of historians in general is owing to their ignorance of the law." Mr. Wythe's exalted character as a lawyer, his virtues and ability as a man and as a patriot cannot be overestimated. The late John Randolph Tucker said of him : " He shone with equal splendor in the Congress of Independence, in the Federal Convention of 1787, and the Ratifying Con vention of 1788, as on the woolsack of the commonwealth. Ever persistent in fighting a pathway to the real right through the technical abattis of the legal forum, until his serene and noble nature could feel he had decided according to the rules of justice, which know no law but the law of God." His mother was a Miss Keith. The Keiths were a family noted for their learn ing, and Thomas Jefferson said : " His early education was directed by his mother. While he studied the Greek testament she sat by holding an English one to aid him in the translation." Before he was twenty-one his mother died, and for several years he was very dissipated, but, as Mr. Patterson says,
"Her influence had implanted in his charac ter the seeds of strength and uprightness," and by the time he was thirty he had become prominent at the bar. It may have been that the fast way of living which pre vailed at William and Mary College during the time he was a student there was greatly responsible for his reckless conduct. It is said the students of that grand old institution, founded more than two hundred years, and which can claim to be the Alma Mater of more great men than any other college in the country, were not, in those early days, always what they should have been; that they would keep race-horses at ye college and bet at ye billiards or other gamingtables." For years Mr. Wythe was the professor of law in William and Mary. He numbered among his pupils John Marshall, Thomas Jefferson and many other men who became famous, and it is said "All of his students entertained for him a veneration that was almost a religion." It was a pleasure to see him bow to any one, and it was said " no one ever expressed more courtesy in a bow." He was middlesized, with dark gray eyes. He was learned and logical. John Randolph Tucker said: "In the celebrated case of the Common wealth v. Caton, Chancellor Wythe, with great boldness and force, laid down the paramount authority of the Constitution and the subordination thereto of all governmental Acts." Patrick Henry was born in 1736, at his father's house of " Studley," in Hanover County. His father had been a loyal officer who " drank the king's health at the head of his regiment," and his mother was a Church of England woman descended from a royalist family. Thinking of the law as the profession of all others requiring much and hard work, it is curious to read that Mr. Henry had in youth "an unconquerable aversion to every species of systematic labor." Marrying at eighteen, "all other experiments " to make a living
