When he had obtained his license to practise he was twenty years of age.  Debating-society fame and drawing-room popularity do not, in an old commonwealth like Virginia, bring practice to a lawyer of twenty.  But, as a distinguished French author has recently remarked of Julius Caesar, “In him was united the elegance of manner which wins, to the energy of character which commands.”  He sought, therefore, a new sphere of exertion far from the refinements of Richmond.  Kentucky, which Boone explored in 1770, was a part of Virginia when Clay was a child, and only became a State in 1792, when first he began to copy Chancellor Wythe’s decisions.  The first white family settled in it in 1775; but when our young barrister obtained his license, twenty-two years after, it contained a white population of nearly two hundred thousand.  His mother, with five of her children and a second husband, had gone thither five years before.  In 1797 Henry Clay removed to Lexington, the new State’s oldest town and capital, though then containing, it is said, but fifty houses.  He was a stranger there, and almost penniless.  He took board, not knowing where the money was to come from to pay for it.  There were already several lawyers of repute in the place.  “I remember,” said Mr. Clay, forty-five years after,

“how comfortable I thought I should be if I could make one hundred pounds a year, Virginia money; and with what delight I received my first fifteen-shilling fee.  My hopes were more than realized.  I immediately rushed into a successful and lucrative practice.”

In a year and a half he was in a position to marry the daughter of one of the first men of the State, Colonel Thomas Hart, a man exceedingly beloved in Lexington.

It is surprising how addicted to litigation were the early settlers of the Western States.  The imperfect surveys of land, the universal habit of getting goods on credit at the store, and “difficulties” between individuals ending in bloodshed, filled the court calendars with land disputes, suits for debt, and exciting murder cases, which gave to lawyers more importance and better chances of advancement than they possessed in the older States.  Mr. Clay had two strings to his bow.  Besides being a man of red tape and pigeon-holes, exact, methodical, and strictly attentive to business, he had a power over a Kentucky jury such as no other man has ever wielded.  To this day nothing pleases aged Kentuckians better than to tell stories which they heard their fathers tell, of Clay’s happy repartees to opposing counsel, his ingenious cross-questioning of witnesses, his sweeping torrents of invective, his captivating courtesy, his melting pathos.  Single gestures, attitudes, tones, have come down to us through two or three memories, and still please the curious guest at Kentucky firesides.  But when we turn to the cold records of this part of his life, we find little to justify his traditional celebrity.  It appears that the principal use