daughters and only children of George Hudson, of Hanover county, had by this marriage eight children, three daughters and five sons, of whom Henry was the seventh, bearing the name of the second son, who had died. The daughters died in early womanhood, two after marriage. George, the eldest child, lived to manhood, and died in Virginia. John, the sixth, removed to New Orleans, and died on the Mississippi. The Rev. Porter Clay, the youngest of the family, was living at Jacksonville, Illinois, in 1844.
The paternal ancestors of Henry Clay were English. Branches of the family are still in the mother-country, of which Sir William Clay, bart., and member of the British House of Commons, is supposed to be one. The branch from which Henry Clay descended removed to America some time after the establishment of the colony of Virginia, and settled on the south side of James river. The descendants of the original Virginia stock, numerous and widely-dispersed, many of whom still reside in Virginia and Kentucky, have branched so extensively, that their common origin is scarcely recognised among themselves.
The Hudson family, on the maternal side of Mr. Clay's ancestry, also came from England, about the beginning of the eighteenth century, and settled in Hanover county, Virginia, where they remained till the abovenamed alliance with the Clay family was formed.
Tradition alleges, that the Rev. John Clay, the father of Henry, was a man of great vigor of character, of exemplary virtue and manners, and of a nice and high sense of the decorums and proprieties of the social relations-not unlike the son, who has made the world familiar with the name of CLAY. It is also in evidence, that the mother of Henry Clay was adorned with eminent female virtues, and that she continued to interest herself in the fortunes of Henry to the last of a good old age. The father died in 1781, bequeathing to his widow little else than an estate of seven children, Henry being then four years old. Obliged by her straitened circumstances to make the most of the ability of her children to help her, Mrs. Clay did not, however, neglect to send them to school. Henry's tuition, for the term of about three years, was committed to the charge of one PETER DEACON, an Englishman, who came to America under a cloud, receiving occasional remittances from home, while he was employed for several years as the schoolmaster of the "Slashes," in which