Then occurred the event which decided his career.  His mother having married again, her husband had influence enough to procure for the lad the place of copying clerk in the office of the Court of Chancery.  The young gentlemen then employed in the office of that court long remembered the entrance among them of their new comrade.  He was fifteen at the time, but very tall for his age, very slender, very awkward, and far from handsome.  His good mother had arrayed him in a full suit of pepper-and-salt “figginy,” an old Virginia fabric of silk and cotton.  His shirt and shirt-collar were stiffly starched, and his coat-tail stood out boldly behind him.  The dandy law clerks of metropolitan Richmond exchanged glances as this gawky figure entered, and took his place at a desk to begin his work.  There was something in his manner which prevented their indulgence in the jests that usually greet the arrival of a country youth among city blades; and they afterwards congratulated one another that they had waited a little before beginning to tease him, for they soon found that he had brought with him from the country an exceedingly sharp tongue.  Of his first service little is known, except the immense fact that he was a most diligent reader.  It rests on better authority than “Campaign Lives,” that, while his fellow-clerks went abroad in the evening in search of pleasure, this lad stayed at home with his books.  It is a pleasure also to know that he had not a taste for the low vices.  He came of sound English stock, of a family who would not have regarded drunkenness and debauchery as “sowing wild oats,” but recoiled from the thought of them with horror.  Clay was far from being a saint; but it is our privilege to believe of him that he was a clean, temperate, and studious young man.

Richmond, the town of the young Republic that had most in it of the metropolitan, proved to this aspiring youth as true a University as the printing-office in old Boston was to Benjamin Franklin; for he found in it the culture best suited to him and his circumstances.  Chancellor Wythe, then sixty-seven years of age, overflowing with knowledge and good nature, was the president of that university.  Its professors were the cluster of able men who had gone along with Washington and Jefferson in the measures which resulted in the independence of the country.  Patrick Henry was there to teach him the arts of oratory.  There was a flourishing and famous debating society, the pride of the young men of Richmond, in which to try his half-fledged powers.  The impulse given to thought by the American Revolution was quickened and prolonged by the thrilling news which every vessel brought from France of the revolution there.  There was an atmosphere in Virginia favorable to the growth of a sympathetic mind.  Young Clay’s excellent handwriting brought him gradually into the most affectionate relations with Chancellor Wythe, whose aged hand trembled to such a degree that he was glad to borrow a copyist from