Those who heard even his latest speeches at the bar have almost all passed away. It was thirty-four years ago that I heard him for the first time in public. At a meeting of the citizens of Norfolk, held in the Town Hall, to give expression to their feelings on the occasion of the death of Jefferson, which occurred on the Fourth of July, 1826, he was called to the chair, and, before taking it, addressed the large assembly for twenty-five or thirty minutes, on the character of the great man whose death they had met to commemorate. He was at that time a senator of the United States, and in the height of his fame; and to hear him speak was then a great novelty, which attracted hundreds to the hall. Though then a youth of nineteen, I can recall his manner and the outline of his speech. He seemed to speak as a man of fine personal appearance accustomed to public speaking and of a good address, who was deeply impressed by the solemnity of his theme, might be expected to speak. His voice was a volume of sweet, full, natural sound, unmarked by any artistic training or modulation, and such as would flow from a well-bred man in animated recitation; and his gestures were those which rose spontaneously and unconsciously with the thought, and were wholly unstudied; thus presenting an obvious contrast to the manner and action of his friend Randolph, whose every attitude, the slightest motion of whose finger, the faintest intonation of whose voice, whose every smile and frown, natural as they seemed, were the deliberate reflection of the closet.
Three years later, in the Virginia Convention of 1829, I heard all that he uttered in committee and in the body; and his manner was such as I have just described it to be. Although he had full command of the whole armory of parliamentary warfare, he had none of that violent gesticulation or loud intonation which fashion or taste has lately introduced among us, but which would not be tolerated a moment in the British House of Commons. His first speech, which was in support of his own resolution proposing a method of procedure in the discussion of the Constitution, though fine and effective, was delivered under somewhat unfavorable circumstances. He stood some distance from the Chair and on a line with it, so that he was compelled to face the audience instead of the Speaker, and to pitch his voice to a key that could be heard throughout the length of the hall and the crowded galleries, and an occasional hoarseness, the result of overstraining, was apparent during his speech. He mentioned this circumstance to me as we left the hall, as the first intimation he had of having lost that control of his voice which had hitherto been equal to every occasion. But when he followed Mr. Monroe, he happened to be in a better position on the floor; and his voice retained its usual fulness, and was pleasing to the ear. And afterwards in the Baptist church, to which the Convention adjourned, in his speech on the election of Governor, his voice was fresh and musical; and in the grand debate on the judiciary tenure, when the debaters were near each other and the Chair, he spoke with full command of his voice, and with great animation. In fine, his manner, including the management of his voice and gesture, approached nearer the English model of debating than that which has been gradually gaining ground in this country, and was most appropriate to his style of thought and discussion.
Tazewell, with all his intercourse with the world, with all his habits of speaking, and with all his marvellous endowments, was a remarkably modest man. His modesty may unfold a clew to the explanation of his whole career. He said himself that he never rose to make a speech without serious trepidation. In the cochineal case, it was obvious to the court and to the spectators. I have seen him, when he had been speaking ten minutes, not fully assured. It was only when personal danger, as in a memorable criminal case, in which even brave men were for a time appalled, was present, that his trepidation disappeared, and he became fearless and defiant.
Nor was the modesty of Tazewell confined to the bar. It pervaded his whole life; and when his fame was coëxtensive with the Union, and when his presence inspired awe in companies of able men, a close observer could detect in his tones or in his manner that he was not wholly at ease. It was only when the ice of a gathering party was fairly broken, that he was thoroughly self-possessed. Like Judge Marshall, he had a profound sense of respect for the female sex; and his attentions to women were rendered with a delicacy and a gallantry that were enhanced by the reflection that such a man was not wholly at ease in approaching them. And nobly did woman repay his courtesy and his affection. As I dwell upon this aspect of his life, the image of her who was the bride of his youth, the partaker of his splendid fame, and the delight of his declining years, rises before me. I behold her as she moved in that happy household, bestowing not a thought upon herself, but intent on making others happy. I see her as she enters the room in which her husband is discoursing on learned topics to those who are grouped around him, and I see him pause as that "ocean-eye" rests benignantly and affectionately upon her. I shall never forget the moment when thirty-five years ago I saw her in her own house for the first time; how cordially she pressed my hand; how kindly she talked to an orphan boy of a father he had never known; and how soon she put an awkward youth of seventeen at his ease. The characteristic grace of that admirable woman was her love of domestic life. With her the throne of human felicity was the family altar. Life with her, as it ever was with those elder Virginia matrons whom she resembled, was too serious a business for pomp and show. Had she been inspired with a passion for display, had she coveted the fleeting honors of a residence at a foreign court, or in the metropolis of our own country, a single word from her lips would have obtained all she wished. But her heart, like a true Virginia mother as she was, was in the midst of her family; and though she properly appreciated the talents of her husband, and was willing that they should be exerted in the public service, she knew him well, and believed that he would be happier in his own home than when he was beset with public cares, or galled by those tortures with which ambition wrings its victims. And when her last day had come, and the union of more than half a century had been dissolved, and her husband had seen her beloved remains put away in that solitary tomb by the sea, the charm of life was lost to him; and he calmly awaited the hour when he should be laid by her side. Nor did the generous care of woman cease with her death. When his hour was come, and he was placed beside her, his daughters, who had tended him for years with unceasing devotion, were borne in almost a dying state from his tomb.
He was keenly alive to the pleasures of friendship; and he maintained his affection for his early schoolmates unbroken to the last. His reverence for Mr. Wythe passed all words. Randolph loved him through life; and Tazewell reciprocated his affection with equal warmth. The tide of his affection for John Wickham from his childhood flowed full and strong. The relations which existed between them could be seen in the letter I read some time ago, and were earnest, tender, and affectionate. The affection which Tazewell cherished for Wickham, kindled, as we have seen, over the spelling-book and the Latin grammar, and showing itself in tears in his sixty-fifth year, grew with his growth, and was enhanced by that elevated sense of appreciation with which each regarded the other. It was pleasing to see them together when the descending shadows of age were upon them, and when each had performed those deeds which are now deemed the greatest of their lives. It would be hard to say whether they stood to each other in the relation of father and son, of brothers, or of equals. Wickham was eleven years older than Tazewell, and had taught him to read. It was evident Mr. Tazewell regarded Mr. Wickham with the greatest deference. It was, however, something more than the deference with which one eminent man advanced in life would show to another eminent man still more advanced; it was the deference of the warmest friendship to an individual who not only reciprocated the feelings of affection, but who possessed all the moral and intellectual qualities that can adorn human nature. He considered Mr. Wickham not only the most accomplished lawyer this country ever produced, but the wisest man he ever knew. I have heard him say that the speech of Mr. Wickham on the doctrine of treason in Burr's trial would have been pronounced new and able in Westminster Hall; and that it was the greatest forensic effort of the American bar. Tazewell's abiding affection for Wickham was such, that he drew upon it in favor even of his young friends. When, at one-and-twenty, I took my seat in the House of Delegates, and, not dreaming of mixing in society, was preparing for a course of study during the long winter nights, one of the first calls I received was from Mr. Wickham. With me his name had passed into history. His great speech, which I had read and studied as I had read and studied the speeches of Chatham and of Burke, was made in the year I was born. But I soon found that he was a living and breathing man. His gentle kindness, his incomparable address, his charming talk, and his cordial hospitality pressed upon me, assured me that his heart still glowed with its ancient kindness: and when I recall the hours which I spent at his elegant home; when I recollect the names of Marshall, Leigh, Johnson, Stanard, Harvie, and others whom I have seen at his hospitable board; when I recall that living galaxy of beauty which flashed in his thronged halls, and of which the sweetest and the brightest were his own household stars,—now, alas! extinct and gone; and his own noble presence and demeanor, which drew from the spoiled and fastidious poet Moore the expression of his admiration and applause, it is with feelings of deep and tender regard, and of grateful veneration, that I offer this tribute to his memory.
The question has often been asked whether Mr. Tazewell was fond of literature and had the elements of a literary man. His early opportunities were not favorable for acquiring a profound knowledge of classical learning. In his day Latin and Greek, the foundation of all true taste in letters, were not taught in William and Mary at all, except in the grammar school. That Tazewell knew enough of Latin to translate easily a Latin author, and even to write the language grammatically, is certain; but that he never rose to that excellence in those tongues to which his old tutor Mr. Wythe attained is equally certain. But of English literature he had drunk deeply. He had Bacon, Locke, Burke, Pope, Shakspeare, Swift, Hume, Gibbon, Johnson, Gillies, Addison, and Roscoe, within three feet of his elbow for the last forty years of his life. In English political history, such as might be gathered from the ordinary historians, and from such books as Baker's Chronicle and Rushworth, he was profoundly skilled. The history of the law from the days of Magna Charta to the passage of the reform bill of Earl Grey's administration, was the study of his whole professional and public life. He not only knew every leading event, every great statute, but he had the minutest details at command, and was always pleased to descant upon a British statute, or on an epoch of British legislation. The excellent volumes of Lord Chancellor Campbell have made a knowledge of the history of the law an easy accomplishment; but Tazewell never read them, and drew his information from the original sources. In the history of Virginia he was, without exception, the greatest proficient of his time. Whatever was told by Smith, Beverly, Keith, Stith, and Burk with his continuators, or by Hening in the statutes at large, or in the journals of the House of Burgesses and of the House of Delegates, or could be gathered from the living voice for eighty years, he knew intimately and could recall at a moment's notice. In respect of the political history of the United States from the adoption of the federal constitution to the day of his death, his knowledge was accurate, ready, and profound. Indeed, if we except the first five years of the federal constitution, it may be said that his actions were a part of that history. He had discussed, in the House of Delegates, the leading measures of the Washington and Adams administrations, and sixty years ago he sate at a stormy period in the House of Representatives of the United States.
But the excellence of Mr. Tazewell consisted not so much in knowing the acts and thoughts of other men, as in the philosophy which he drew from the great facts in all history. He was not in the German, or even in the English sense, a reader of many books; but there was hardly a topic of literature or history which he had not studied, and respecting which he had not elaborated a theory of his own. Even in law he was more apt to work out a question which required a solution than to turn to the books of reports. Neither at the bar nor in the senate was he fond of quoting authorities; but such as he did quote were of the highest merit, and he made them do him yeoman service. Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy and Warburton's Divine Legation of Moses were favorite books with him. He thought the report of John Quincy Adams on weights and measures one of the ablest works in political literature.
The tendency of his mind and character was wholly practical. Common sense was his polar star. He must be judged not as a scholar or a lawyer or a statesman merely, but as a man of business who was required to accomplish a given purpose. If that purpose was to be accomplished by writing, he took up his pen; if by speech, he rose at the bar and pleaded the case, or in the senate and made a speech. But when the end was attained he thought no more about the means which he had used in attaining it, whether by writing or speaking, than the carpenter who has finished a house thinks of the scaffolding by which he was enabled to complete it. Hence Mr. Tazewell never corrected a speech for the press, if we except two instances; and his greatest speeches are either wholly lost, or exist in the merest outline. But, looking to the result, he was almost invariably successful, at least in the sphere in which he acted; and on the attainment of his purpose forgot the means by which he reached it. If his speeches such as they are, his reports on public questions, his legal opinions, his essays and tracts on political and historical topics, and his private letters, were collected together, the variety of his powers and his singular abilities would strike every reader; and that his works ought to be preserved in volumes is a matter of public interest and is due to his memory.
I have said that Mr. Tazewell should not be considered as a mere scholar, a mere lawyer, or a mere statesman, but in that most august of all characters, the citizen of a commonwealth. But to show what manner of man he was to my younger friends, let us regard him in the aspect of a lawyer, and as he stood in the three great departments of his profession. In criminal law he was easily the first. It was the opinion of a gentleman, his early contemporary at the bar, who has united in his own person in a more eminent degree than was ever before known in Virginia the rare qualities of a writer on metaphysics, history, and literature,—an opinion expressed to me since the death of Tazewell,—that he was the ablest criminal lawyer of his age, and that he would sooner confide an important criminal case to him than to any other living man. This is but an echo of his general reputation in this department of the law. Analyze the qualities necessary to form a great criminal lawyer—his various power of speech, his skill in the evisceration of facts, his tact and ability in arranging the best line of defence possible in the case, the skill in addressing the jury, and the skill, of a different sort, in addressing the court, his superior generalship in the conflicting and unexpected developments during a trial which threaten instant defeat, his fearlessness, and that perfect self-possession which not only conceals his own fears and weaknesses, but avails itself of the fears and weaknesses of others, and of that deep insight into human passions, penetrating far beyond the eye, or the ear, or the ordinary reason: count the attainments which such a man must possess to win supremacy in such a sphere, and we must assent to the general opinion which places supremacy in such a sphere one of the highest achievements of human intellect and character. Then contemplate that excellence which is shown in the conduct of civil cases as contradistinguished from criminal—that various power here, too, of speech, in itself the lesson of a life to learn—the skill, too, in addressing juries and the court with equal effect; that knowledge of the law in its innumerable doctrines, principles, and decisions, which made the study even in Lord Coke's day the work of twenty years; the prompt application of this learning to the rapid matter in hand; the magical use of the faculties of the mind and the wondrous discipline which they must have undergone, every hour, every minute demanding a stretch of thought and an adroitness of discrimination which have justly classed the dialectics of the bar above all the dialectics of the schools; and the moral as well as intellectual qualities necessary in an adept in the varying practice of municipal law; and here, too, we will yield to the general opinion which places excellence in this single department one of the highest achievements of mind; and then recall what such a judge as Spencer Roane, the ablest and sternest judge of the age, and politically hostile to Tazewell, said when Tazewell pleaded the case of Longvs.Colston before the Court of Appeals. Then let us follow the profession beyond and above the region of municipal law into the higher walk of the Laws of Nations, and of that great practical part of those laws, the law of admiralty. Consider what eminence is, and what it involves, in this department which the master spirits of ancient as well as of modern time selected as their peculiar sphere; what the talents are that may contend with the greatest intellects of the age in that greatest of all our gladiatorial arenas, the Supreme Court of the United States, and what various and rare excellencies must unite in forming a man who may stand forth and share in such generous battle, and, still more, shall come off victorious from such a field. And when, by blending all these characters, each great in itself, and worthy of the ambition of the highest talents and of the longest life, into a single character, we have made a fame which the grandest intellects of modern times might glory in attaining, we have but one of the elements, developed during a comparatively short period only of his career, that make up the reputation of him whose memory we have met this day to honor.
Then, if you please, regard him as a senator, representing the sovereignty of Virginia in our more than Amphictyonic Council. Take any speech which he delivered during his term of service—the speech on the Bankrupt law; the speech on the Piracy bill, which, as it was delivered by him, and not as it appears debased and dwarfed in the report, was one of the grandest displays of pure intellect ever made in the Senate, and which saved the country from giving cause of war to Spain and, perhaps and probably, from actual war; the speech on the Census, which his colleague who sat by his side during its delivery told me gave both Calhoun and Webster quite as much to do as was grateful to both of them; the speech on the Admirals; the reports from the Committee on Foreign Affairs for seven or eight years which controlled the public opinion of the time; that consummate ability which in its grandest displays inspired the hearer with the belief that the speaker, great as he was, was capable of yet greater things-par negotiis et supra—his speeches so settling matters that it seemed almost vain to say anything after him for or against, and calling the remark from Webster, when Tazewell was making one of his last speeches in the senate, "Why, Tazewell grows greater every day." Form your notion of what must enter into the formation of such a character, and then you have another of those elements that make up the character of Tazewell.
Then take your model of a man who draws his sustenance from the plough, a private citizen, who lives privately, not because he cannot obtain office, but because, having won the highest honors, he withdraws from the scene and leaves the glittering rewards of public service to be divided among those who seek them. Look for his name in the newspapers, and you will not find it from year's end to year's end; look for deep intrigues in local politics, and you will find no finger of his in the dirty work. Look at the ill success of those who have engaged in public affairs, their pecuniary entanglements, their deferred hopes, their sleepless nights, those poisoned fountains of feeling bitter as aloes even to the eye that looks on them as they bubble; these and such things you may find, and find easily, but not at the door of Tazewell. He is strictly a private citizen, engaged in his private affairs, raising and selling at fair prices in company with his neighbors his oats and corn and potatoes, and showing to all that the highest faculties are as practical as the lowest, and that diligence and attention always have their reward. Without patrimony, with a moderation in taking fees without an example in our land, living as became a gentleman of his position in life and affairs, he yet accumulated a larger fortune than was probably ever before accumulated by a Virginia farmer or a lawyer beginning life without patrimony; and when wealth was obtained, living with that modesty and simplicity so becoming to great genius and great wealth, ever looking with just contempt on that most piteous of all spectacles, the spectacle of lofty genius debruised and debased by the accursed thirst for gold; and presenting in all the private relations of life an example which may be held up for the imitation of the old and the young. When you have combined these various characters into one whole, you may form some general notion of what Mr. Tazewell was.
His head was of the clearest. Horace says of Apollo that he did not always keep his bow bent; but Tazewell's mind was always on the stretch, or, in a stricter sense, was never on the stretch at all. The most intricate combination of figures he saw through at a glance; and in the arts the most complex machinery was easily understood by him, and readily made plain to others by his familiar explanations. Processes of reasoning the most elaborate seemed rather the play of his mind than a serious exercise of its powers; and in his most refined speculations he never for a moment lost himself, or allowed the hearer to lose him. When in a playful mood he chose to use the weapons of the sophist, the ablest men feared the ticklish game and fought shy, and where the line lay between truth and error it was impossible to find out; and he was equally skilful in unravelling the sophistry of others, dissecting it asunder with the keenest relish and with exquisite skill. When he seriously undertook to assert and defend the truth, he was irresistible, and it was vain to oppose him. Excessive ingenuity has been laid at his door; but, while conceding that his long dallying with inferior courts was likely to lead to faults in that direction, yet, if we look to the occasions when he was charged with using it, and its effect at the time, we may be inclined to believe that his judgment of the line of argument to be pursued was as likely to be appropriate as that of the critic who formed his opinion according to some abstract standard of propriety.
He was never out of tune. Call on him when you would, and you found him self-poised and fresh. Argument or narrative followed at your command. This part of his character was very apparent to me during the last seven years of his life. In that interval I called to see him frequently; and, as my own studies lay in the walks of our earlier history, the talk usually ran, for a time at least, on the men and things of an epoch in which the Revolution held the middle place. He seemed to have perfect command of his stores, not by the mere effort of recollection, but of memory and reflection combined, eliminating a truth from the facts which concealed it. A specimen of the talk which actually occurred between us may illustrate my remark. I would approach him and say deliberately in his ear—for within a few years past he had become slightly deaf—"Mr. Tazewell, Col. Richard Bland (who, by the way, died in October, 1776) wrote tracts in the Parson's cause, a tract against the Quakers, and his inquiry into the rights of the colonies; did he write any other pamphlet?" Quick as thought he replied: "Yes, he wrote a tract on the tenure of lands in Virginia, showing that they were allodial and not held in fee. I read the tract when I was a boy; and it helped me in my examination for a license to practise law." He had probably not recalled this fact before for half a century: no copy of the tract is preserved; and there was not another human being then living, I may venture to say, who knew of the existence of such a tract; and so at times with other facts which he recalled after the lapse of seventy years, and which he had learned from his father or from Mr. Wythe. On the other hand, when his earlier recollections were clearly proved to be inaccurate as to matter of fact, as in the case of what he thought had happened at the session of the House of Burgesses of 1765, when Henry's resolutions against the stamp act were passed, and I placed under his eye the discrepancy between his statement of the case and the entry on the journals of the House, he would fight manfully in defence of his own views, but generally ended in cases where the proof was conclusive: "Well, sir, Mr. Wythe told me so." Dates not common or easily reached were fixed in his memory by a kind of connexion with his own life; as for instance, I would ask him whether he remembered the features of Peyton Randolph? And he would answer: "No, sir; I was born in December, 1774, and he died in October, 1775, in Philadelphia, when I was not a year old." And it was by questions such as these, which I could answer with exact precision myself, that I ascertained not only the integrity and worth of his memory, which we all know in aged persons retains with freshness the incidents of youth, but his capacity of combination which, in the degree in which he possessed it, was extremely rare in young or old; and from the nature of my pursuits for the time in question I may be said not only to have tested his powers of recollection, but to have probed the depth of his knowledge in relation to the history of Virginia and its cognate topics more effectually than it was the privilege of any one else to do; and my admiration of his talents and of his resources increased to the last. Let it be remembered that there was no more reason to look for profound learning on these subjects from Mr. Tazewell, whose life was crowded with business, than from any of his eminent contemporaries, some of whom I knew well, but none of whom approached him in these respects; and I have pointed out, merely for the sake of example, a single department of knowledge only in which I happened to take a passing interest, leaving all those untouched on which I have heard him discourse for thirty years at least, and you will be able to form an opinion of the nature, variety, and extent of his acquisitions, and feel with me what a gap the death of such a man has made in the commonwealth.
From the complexion of his mind he was cautious in bestowing commendation on men and things. Great speeches in public bodies rarely came up to his severe and simple standard of taste; and I do not think that he was sensible in a very high degree of the minor elegancies of rhythm and the harmony of words. His own style might be defined plain words in their right places; and he had studied Anglo-Saxon, and drew largely on the Anglo-Saxon element of our tongue, and especially on its monosyllables. His logic was generally so severe that not a clause and hardly a word could be changed or misplaced without danger, and the merit of his work was rather in the strength and beauty of the demonstration as a whole, than in the rhetorical grace or effect of its several parts. I speak of his great arguments. In his letters he sometimes showed a skill in harmony rarely surpassed. His letter to the executor of Mr. Wickham is delicately drawn; his letter to Mr. Foote on the compromise resolutions is a chaste and elegant composition; and his address from the chair at a meeting of the citizens of Norfolk on the occasion of the death of Jefferson, which I have already alluded to, when he proposed a statue to the author of the Declaration of Independence, was of that rare beauty of thoughts and words in happy union bound, that, though delivered thirty-four years ago, it is with me to this hour one of the most refreshing of my memories of the past. But these were exceptions, and his severe standard was the general rule. Hence, while he valued the vast and conclusive learning of Gibbon, he was not taken with his diction; and though he despised the toryism of Hume, he regarded his style as approaching perfection. He liked the fervid genius of the elder Pitt, and his brilliant speeches, because they were effective weapons in their day; but he would look with contempt at any effort of imitation. While he relished the arguments of Judge Marshall at the bar, in public bodies, and on the bench, I do not think that he placed as high a value as they deserved upon the ability and literary taste which characterize the opinions of Judge Story, and which have earned for their author the highest legal fame at home and abroad. From the eloquent parts of such speeches as Webster's in reply to Hayne he would turn with dislike. Yet when a speech was effective in the delivery, and, though not remarkable in itself, had accomplished something, he was liberal in bestowing fair praise upon it. He heard Mr. Clay deliver his celebrated reply to Josiah Quincy—a venerable statesman who still survives;—and he ever spoke of it as admirable in its way. In the same spirit he spoke of Col. Benton's extemporaneous reply to Mr. Webster in the debate on the bank veto, delivered late at night in the Senate, as surpassing any thing of the kind that he had ever heard, or that the speaker ever reached before or after. He said he thought a speech of Webster's delivered during the war or soon after it, probably the speech on the currency, superior to his speech in reply to Hayne, and altogether free from the tinsel of his later speeches. The speech of Pinkney on the Missouri question, which he heard, he thought the ablest ever delivered in the senate. For the intellect of Calhoun he had the highest respect and admiration, and, while differing most essentially from that statesman throughout nearly his whole career, he always regarded his speeches and state papers as those of a master-workman. Strange as it may appear, though exacting so much from his eminent contemporaries, yet, partly from old affection, partly from a love of their literature and from a conviction of their political effect, and partly from the unworthiness of poor human nature, he listened to the speeches of John Randolph with the relish of a school-boy, rubbing his hands and laughing heartily as the orator went along. Aside from the ardent and unquenchable love that existed between them, the explanation may be found to a certain extent in Tazewell's love of humor. When Watkins Leigh's amusing letter of Christopher Quandary appeared in the Enquirer,—a paper, by the way, which, after the feud in the Jefferson administration, he never took in, thus showing that, if the democrats remembered his shortcomings, he did not forget what he deemed theirs—I took the number around to him, and he laughed heartily at its hits. The last extended work which I know that he read was Randall's Life of Jefferson, which evidently made an impression upon him. He spoke of the author as a clever fellow; and he expatiated on the character of Jefferson, which, as he declined in life, I think he valued more than ever, pronouncing him the greatest Secretary of State any country ever had. I may say here, that Mr. Tazewell had no respect for law schools as an instrumentality of rearing great lawyers. He said if the student would have lectures, let him read Blackstone; and he ever maintained the opinion that the popularity of those charming commentaries had tended to depreciate the standard of legal intellect since their appearance—an opinion which he shared with Mr. Jefferson. That he had read them attentively and admired their beauty, though much in the spirit in which he would admire a poem or a play, I know from this fact, that once, when he was in a playful mood, he said he believed he could repeat the heads of all the chapters of the four volumes which he straightway did. He occasionally read novels, but was quite indifferent whether he began with the second or the first volume; and I heard him commend highly the preface of the late novel attributed to Sir Walter Scott, called Moredun, as a fine piece of special pleading, declaring that its author would make a good special pleader. I have spoken already of the hearty praise which he bestowed upon Mr. Adams' report on weights and measures.
In respect both of argumentation and style it has often occurred to me that Mr. Tazewell occupied an intermediate position between Judge Marshall and Mr. Wickham. He has the strength of Marshall with something more of refinement in style and imagery, and more vivacity in the play of his reasoning; while he has a stricter line of demonstration than Wickham without his very decided elegance. In some physical as well as intellectual aspects he resembled Chief Justice Parsons of Massachusetts. Not, indeed, in dress; for Parsons was a sloven, and Tazewell was neat in his dress, which was in winter, during the last twenty years, a full suit of black cloth, and in summer he was usually attired in white drilling with a light linen coat and fancy vest. He always wore a white cravat, and his linen was spotless. But both Parsons and Tazewell were men of large stature, at least to the eye, in a sitting posture; both delighted to drink at the deep fountains of the law, and were skilled in the lore of their profession in which they held an easy supremacy; both liked novels as a relief from grave cares, and were indifferent as to the volume of the novel that first came to hand; both were so strongly enamored of the exact sciences that it is probable they would have cultivated them with extraordinary success. But Tazewell, though a fair scholar in the old way, never attained to that excellence in classical literature which made the name of Parsons an authority for a disputed reading in the colleges of Germany. I have always regretted that Tazewell did not bring his mind to bear upon the science of language, and especially of comparative philology. Had he been able to read Bonn, or had mastered the New Cratylus or the Varronianus of Donaldson, his versatile and sharp intellect might have sent forth a work of "winged words" of equal interest and infinitely more profound than the Diversions of Purley.
Tazewell had evidently modelled his mind before the death of president Pendleton in 1802; and nearly up to that period Marshall and Wickham were the leaders of the Virginia bar. His reverence for Pendleton was something more than a shadow. It was, as also in the case of Wythe, a deep-seated, ever-living and glowing principle. He loved those two illustrious judges with a warmth of veneration blended with affection which he never felt for any human being after they were laid in their graves; and he delighted to speak of them. He held Pendleton's judicial talents in the highest respect; and I have heard him say that no man living but Pendleton could have reconciled the clashing laws passed during the first twelve years of the commonwealth, and made such just and satisfactory decisions. Speaking of the peculiarities of Pendleton and Wythe, he said that Pendleton always professed the most profound respect for British decisions, but rarely followed them; while Wythe, who spoke disrespectfully of them, almost invariably followed them. But, on the ground of pure love and affection, Wythe was nearer to Tazewell than was Pendleton. Wythe was the guide and instructor of his youth, the old neighbor of his father in Williamsburg; and he always spoke of him asMr.Wythe, following his father who knew Wythe long before he was a judge. His reminiscences of Wythe were deeply interesting, sometimes humorous, sometimes serious, and, in reference to the last illness of the old patriot, sad in the extreme; and they were always uttered in that subdued and tender tone which, it grieves me to think, will fall no more on mortal ears.
The great age attained by Mr. Tazewell makes us curious to know his modes of life and his habits of study. In youth and early manhood he was fond of athletic sports and of horsemanship; and he must have possessed great muscular power. As late as 1802 he accomplished on horseback a trip of a hundred and odd miles in as short a time as that distance was ever travelled in Virginia. His form was most symmetrical; and he had the broad chest and the well-proportioned neck that are so often seen in those who enjoy a healthful and protracted old age; and that small wrist and hand that told of his Norman blood. From the time when he became engrossed in business, it is probable that he rarely took any other exercise than was inevitable in passing to his various courts; and since his retirement from the bar, except during his trips to the Eastern Shore and to Washington and Richmond, he seldom walked more than a few hundred yards in twenty-four hours. Yet, throughout his career, he enjoyed fair health, and during the last forty years, when, as man and boy, I have observed him, he has not had more than one really serious spell of illness—a pleuritic attack, which he encountered in Washington. In that interval he has contracted several bilious diseases; but they soon passed off, and were not thought dangerous. The secret of his exemption from disease, apart from the healthful structure of his frame, was the extreme temperance and the regularity of his habits. At first sight he would seem the most irregular of men, sitting up till two or three in the morning and rising late; but, in fact, this habit, persisted in for so many years, became fixed; and, as nature requires regular periods of rest rather than any special time for taking it, he suffered no material inconvenience in that respect. But his main source of exemption from sickness was his temperance in eating. I had an opportunity of seeing him daily at every meal for many weeks, and he ate more sparingly than any one of those who sate at the table with him. He generally took a glass of toddy or a glass of wine at dinner; and the only form in which he used tobacco was in chewing. If he ever went into excess in any thing it was in the use of tobacco; but he never appeared to me to err above ordinary chewers even in that way, though I have heard one of his clerks say that he could always tell the dignity of a case by the size of the chew which Tazewell put into his mouth when he took it up for the first time. His usual remedy for indisposition was strict abstinence from food, which he could endure as heroically as a Brahmin, or a disciple of Mahomet.
Many to whom the name of Mr. Tazewell is dear would be inclined to know his opinion respecting the religion of Christ. Far be it from me to intimate in the remotest degree that the testimony of any man, however distinguished, can add the weight of a single feather to the abounding evidences of the Christian faith, or grave it a line deeper on the heart of a true believer; but it may close the lips of the ribald, it may repress the vanity of her who, forgetting what Christianity has done for woman, aims her feeble shafts against its humblest professor, to know that such a man as Tazewell, whose whole life was spent in the science of proofs and probabilities, must henceforth be ranked with Milton and Newton—the prince of song and the prince of philosophy, and with our own Pendleton and Wythe—those serene and undying lights of the law—among the stedfast believers in the truth of the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments.[11]
It has been said that Tazewell had no ambition. In one sense he was the most ambitious man of our times; but his ambition was out of the ordinary range. To retain a seat in a deliberative assembly, and endure the routine of daily sessions for months at a time; to take upon himself a regular foreign mission, or even to accept the presidency itself, would, I firmly believe, have been most grating to his feelings. Of all but the last we may speak with certainty. But if some difficult proposition was forced upon the public mind; if some extraordinary emergency had presented itself; if he had been called upon to encounter a national question of the first magnitude, from which others would have shrunk, and which was susceptible of a definitive adjustment in a given time, I believe he would have accepted the mission at once. Had Mr. Madison, on his election to the presidency, called him to the State Department with acarte blancheas to the terms and mode of settling the vexed questions which grew out of the Berlin and Milan decrees and the British orders in council, I do not say that he would have accepted a seat in the cabinet of a statesman whose election to the presidency he had opposed,—for I believe he would not; but, if he had accepted it, it is probable those questions which were afterwards discussed by Mr. Webster and Lord Ashburton, and which were settled by the treaty of Washington, would then have received a satisfactory solution. It was this aspect of Tazewell's character which called from Randolph the saying in his letter to Gen. Mercer, that, if such a conjuncture in our affairs were to arise as would call into full play the faculties of Tazewell, he would be the first man of the nineteenth century.
It has been said by some from whom better things might have been expected, that Tazewell did not spend his latter years in a manner altogether worthy of his great talents. To me it appears that such a sentiment has been expressed without due reflection on all the facts of the case, and that the retirement of such a man, under all the circumstances, presents to the contemplative observer one of the grandest moral spectacles of the age. We have seen that he retired from the active employment of the bar in his 45th or 46th year, merely following up afterwards to the appellate courts some important cases which he had discussed in the lower. At that time he stood almost without a rival in his profession in Virginia, and, after the death of Pinkney, in the Supreme Court of the United States; and he might have received as large an annual income as was ever derived from the practice of the law in this country; and if he had devoted his time and talents to his profession for twenty years thereafter—which he might have done, and yet been younger on leaving off than Webster was when that eminent lawyer pleaded the great India-rubber case at Trenton, and would still have had sixteen or eighteen years to spare for repose in old age,—he would have accumulated the most colossal fortune which has ever been made by forensic exertions at the American or the English bar. Now this very aspect of the life of Mr. Tazewell strikes me, and I feel assured will appear to posterity, as the most imposing, the most eloquent, and the most sublime picture in his various career. When he retired he was not wealthy, according to our present standard of wealth, and he had several children born to him after his retirement; yet, with enormous wealth within his grasp, and a moderate competency only in hand, he withdrew from the field of his fame to the bosom of his family, thenceforth to draw his living from the moderate profits of agriculture. I have said that Mr. Tazewell's character was formed in the mould of our early statesmen; and of all those statesmen there was not one who did not delight in agriculture as the crowning pleasure and pursuit of life, and more especially as its shadows were falling low. It was this spirit which impelled Washington, amid all the magnificence of office when office was held by such a man, to sigh for the shades of Mount Vernon, and to prefer the simple employments of the farm, where he might behold, in the words of the "judicious Hooker," "God's blessing spring out of our mother earth," above the glory of arms, and the fleeting shadows and shabby splendors of public office.
But the lesson which the example of Tazewell presents to the American mind is of yet greater significancy. If there be one unpleasant trait more revolting than another in our national character, it is the inordinate pursuit of wealth:rem, quocunque modo rem. To get money is the first lesson of childhood, the engrossing purpose of middle age, and the harassing employment of declining years. Such is the rabid thirst for money, its effects are seen over the whole moral and intellectual character of the people. It constitutes wealth as the standard of worth, and all the noblest qualities of the head and the heart are despised in the comparison. As wealth is the point of honor, it must be sought at every hazard, and the mortifying occurrences of the last twenty years, the dishonest bankruptcies, the numerous forgeries, perpetrated by the first people in social position, on a scale never known before, the innumerable defalcations which have crowded the papers, until they have become a matter of course; the insatiable craving for the money and lands of others, which seems to have passed from the workshop and the counting-room to the halls of legislation; the unbounded extravagance of expenditure which might serve to indicate the possession of the darling prize, and, above all, that worst sign of all, the almost perfect indifference with which the most enormous frauds are received by the public; these and similar things show the bitter consequences of this vulgar passion. I rejoice that our venerable friend, when in the prime of his extraordinary powers, and at a period of life when the flame of ambition glows wildest, turned his back upon the gilded phantoms which have lured so many to destruction, and sought repose in the bosom of domestic life.
The conduct of Mr. Tazewell in respect of public office has also been misunderstood. He would hold no office in perpetuity, and I have already shown that, whenever called upon to render public service, he obeyed the call without a thought of the pecuniary sacrifices which he inevitably must incur;[12]and it would be easy, if it were proper, to show that Mr. Tazewell, though in retirement, afforded most valuable assistance to those who held office, and indeed to all who chose to consult him. He held it as a settled maxim, that it was the first duty of every citizen to serve his country; and I have no doubt that, if the office of Chief Justice of the United States had become vacant during the first fifteen or twenty years after his retirement from the bar, and he had been called to fill it, as perhaps he would have been, he would have accepted the appointment; and I further believe that if the presidency of the Court of Appeals had been tendered him, or even the judgeship of the Superior Court on the Eastern Shore, provided in this last case he did not interfere with the expectations of his brethren of that bar, he would have accepted either, and held it for a certain time, and for a certain time only; for he had no respect for perpetuities in great public trusts.
They also misjudge him who say that he ought to have composed a great historical work for posterity—a task which Jefferson, Madison, and John Quincy Adams, with every possible motive urging them to its performance, declined to undertake. In this respect, Mr. Tazewell acted with his usual good sense; not that he did not write on particular topics of our history, as, for instance, the difference between the original and recent surveys, a subject which he has illustrated with a skill in mathematics, with a beauty of argumentation, and with a minuteness of historical research wholly unexpected, and altogether admirable; and so with some other topics. But he acted well in not undertaking the history of Virginia. To write that history worthily would require a residence of some years abroad. Of the materials necessary for such a work not a twentieth part exists in Virginia, or in the United States. Such a work, and Mr. Tazewell well knew its scope, could not be performed by him in that retirement to enjoy which he had relinquished wealth and fame. There is another view of a more personal kind. Whether history is of higher dignity than speech, whether a Thucydides or a Demosthenes be the greater intellect, the critics may decide; but one thing is certain, that the faculties and accomplishments required for writing history and for oral disputations are not only not the same, but have rarely been united in a supreme degree in any human being, and certainly not in the literature of the Anglo-Saxon race. To pass over other languages and nations, let us look at our own. One of the greatest minds of this age, and, so far as logical capacity is concerned, perhaps of any age, was that of Chief Justice Marshall; and yet, from the date of the publication of his Life of Washington, which is a history of the colonies and of the United States, until it was rewritten and revised by him late in life, it hung like a millstone from his neck; and it has required all his subsequent legal fame, his exalted patriotism, and his domestic purity, to keep him above water in this country. As for England, the work sunk instantly and irrecoverably.
The writing of history, difficult at all times, is more difficult now. Recent history trenches alike upon the epic and the dramatic, and the narrator must be half a poet and half a player. It is, therefore, a subject of gratulation that Mr. Tazewell did not undertake a work which, if done at home, would have been badly done, and which, if done at all, must have called into exercise a peculiar class of talents which neither the bar nor the senate tends to develop, but which in their highest efforts alone can ensure success. I rejoice that the fame of Tazewell is free from such questionable topics. There he stands, great as a citizen of a free commonwealth, great at the bar, great in the senate, and great in his rich, various, and overflowing talk.
Tazewell spent his old age as Washington, Jefferson, Jay, Madison, and John Adams spent theirs, but with far greater success than them all, in attending mainly to his private affairs, and in those offices which a splendid reputation draws in its train. He was exact in all things. If you inquired what any one of his estates cost him, he would take down a bound foolscap volume, turn at once to the farm in question, read off the price, the amount of its outfit, the number of hands engaged in working it, and, if you pleased to listen, the cost of every improvement he put upon it, the division of its fields, and their products for every year since he owned it, and the money value of those products in market. He knew what fields on his various estates were in cultivation; and in the spring—for all his crops were annual—he made an estimate of the probable product of each field, and entered it in the book; and in the fall, the actual result, which sometimes fell a little short, sometimes slightly exceeded, and sometimes was identical with the estimate of the spring. This process was something more than a pastime; it kept him intimately acquainted with his different estates, and was a severe check on the management of the overseers. He loved the game of chess, was always ready to engage in it, and often played alone. He read chess periodicals, kept an account of his own moves, and, deducting the employment which it gave him when his eyes were dimmed with reading, devoted to that fascinating but frivolous game more time and attention than it deserved.
To form a just opinion of Mr. Tazewell in private life, he must have been seen again and again. In matters of business he was scrupulously exact himself, and would be satisfied with nothing less from others. In this way he may have given offence, and subjected himself to the charge of closeness; but it was partly the result of his legal habits, and partly of the rigid system which pervaded his financial schemes. That the love of accumulation was no element in the case was shown, apart from the great lesson which his life will read to all, by his large deposits in the vaults of the banks, by which, in the course of thirty years, he must have lost thousands; and by the proverbial moderation of his fees.[13]Such was his care and judgment that I do not think he ever made a bad investment, or lost a sum of money.
Withal I am inclined to wish that he had devoted the first ten years of his retirement to a work on the Laws of Nations, and especially of the Law of Admiralty, which was the favorite science of his venerable grandfather, and of which, during the preceding twenty years, he had obtained so perfect a mastery. He loved the Common Law, revelled in its subtleties, expounded with a richness and a grace ever to be remembered the leading statutes by which the wisdom of a thousand years had controlled or modified it, and gloried in it as the living remembrancer of the liberties of his ancestral land. But he regarded the law of admiralty with peculiar and almost hereditary affection. It suited the caste of his intellect. No ordinary horizon bounded its sphere. It overlooked the limits of any single realm, however proud that realm might seem. It was the queen of the sea, whose influence, cast far and wide over the raging billows, breathed peace and safety to the humblest sailor who trod a deck, and upheld with all the strength of civilized man the flag of the feeblest power. Amid the changing revolutions of the human will, amid the fall of empires and the ruin of dynasties, it alone was immutable. It was the tie of nations, which bound men in one universal brotherhood, and gathered peoples about a common altar. No private rule, no immemorial custom, no formal statute, controlled its operations; but right reason in all its supremacy enacted its provisions, and justice, with an even hand, in every dominion and on every sea under heaven, was its pure and equal administrator. Tazewell was fond of repeating that eloquent and exact definition of the general law, which Lord Mansfield, plucking it from the fragments of Cicero's work on the Republic, has made the household thought of our common nature:Non erit alia lex Romæ, alia Athenis, alia nunc, alia posthac, sed et apud omnes gentes et omnia tempora, una eademque lex obtinebit.[14]Such a science suited the complexion of Tazewell's genius; and in his practice he had framed a large and liberal system of his own. The task would have been a work of love, and would have required little more than the embodiment of his thoughts on paper. But the engagements and associations of Southern life are hostile to authorship, and the fortunate time glided by forever.
A hundred years hence, when Norfolk may or may not have become the commercial seat of a vast Southern empire; when the face of external nature in this low region, unmarked by mountain ranges, will be wholly changed in all but in the course of our great river and of our two glorious seas; and when the rising genius of Virginia, turning from the sages and statesmen of Greece and Rome, from Socrates and Demosthenes, and from Cato and Cincinnatus, shall seek to know the details of the lives of the greater men who have adorned our own annals; it may be pleasing to know the spot in which Tazewell spent his latter years, and the manner of his private life. Simplicity marked his dress, his dwelling and its furniture, and all his accompaniments. His house and grounds were such as appeared, if you looked into the assessors' books, of considerable value; but if you looked at the objects themselves, they were such as any respectable citizen might possess without the reputation of great wealth. The lot, bounded on the east by Granby street, included several acres in the heart of the city; and the house, which, though capacious, had no idle room, was a plain structure of wood built originally by a private citizen of moderate means as his abode. Its position in front of a large lawn overlooking the Elizabeth could not be surpassed. The water came rippling up to the southern enclosure twice a day from the sea, and presented a broad silvery expanse on which every arriving and departing vessel of the port was borne in broad view from the portico. But, aside from the assessed value of the lot, which was accidental and produced nothing, there was no exhibition of wealth within. All was plain as became the residence of a man who had those claims to public respect which no mere wealth could give, and which the absence of wealth could not impair. As you lifted the knocker of his door—for he never adopted the comparative novelty of bells in our region—a black servant, who, with his ancestors of several generations, had been born in the family, soon appeared, and you entered a broad central passage which extended through the house, which was the old sitting place of Virginia families for nine months of the year, and which is hardly known in the crowded cities of the North. The floor of the passage was covered with a strip of carpeting in winter, and in summer presented a smooth polished surface devoid of matting. If you opened the first door on the left, you entered the office of Mr. Tazewell, a well lighted southern room, fourteen by twenty, in the middle of which was a table furnished with writing apparatus and covered with books and manuscripts. By that table, in an arm-chair, he commonly sate in cold weather; and the chances were, at least during the morning, you would find him pen in hand, and sheets of paper freshly written and full of figures strewn about him. It was rare that you saw any thing like continuous writing except in the case of a letter. He delighted in calculations, which kept his mind sweet and clear. At his left hand, and a little behind him, was a small bookcase containing about two hundred volumes, neatly bound, of the English classics, all printed forty years ago and more, the very pith and quintessence of the philosophy, the politics, the literature of all ages strained through the alembic of the Anglo-Saxon mind. The office opened by a large folding-door into the capacious dining-room where the family usually sate, and where he lingered after each meal, talking, or reading the day's paper, which he took in to the last, as if loth to retire to his own particular den. In summer he sate in the passage, or on the broad tessellated pavement of the portico. On the right hand on entering the front door you saw a small room in which an aged or invalid guest might repose without ascending the stairway, and in which Gen. Jackson and Mr. Randolph lodged at various times. And adjoining this room was the parlor, a single room of twenty by twenty, containing probably the same furniture he purchased when he first went to housekeeping, all plain now, though elegant in its day, and thoroughly kept; and suspended from the walls of the room were the portraits of his father, Judge Tazewell, a handsome youth of one-and-twenty though a married man at that age, and his bride, a sweet face almost perfectly reflected in the features of one of his own daughters, both well executed by the elder Peale, and in good preservation. There, too, were the portraits of Col. Nivison and his wife, the parents of Mrs. Tazewell; of Mr. Tazewell himself by Thompson, the most intellectual and lifelike of all his portraits, taken at the age of forty-two; of his wife's two sisters, who were the beauties and the belles of forty-five years ago, and who have long passed away, and of their brother, the amiable and beloved William Nivison, whose early death was long deplored by our people. The general library of Mr. Tazewell was kept in a separate building, and consisted of his numerous law books, of the British statutes at large in many thick quartos, and most of the writers of Queen Anne's time and of the Georges, many in the original quarto, and few or none later than the beginning of the century. Some of the books had a history of their own. There was a copy of the Lectures on History, which Dr. Priestley had presented to Judge Tazewell, the father of our subject, in memory of the kindness of the judge to the author when he was flying from the flames of Birmingham. The beautiful copy of Wilson's Ornithology with Bonaparte's continuation, which at the date of its publication was one of the most elegant issues of the American press, had a singular value in the eyes of Mr. Tazewell as the bequest of his friend John Wickham, an extract from the will having been pasted on the fly-leaf of the first volume.
As soon as the visitor fixed his eyes on Mr. Tazewell all else was forgotten. He was without exception in middle life the most imposing, and in old age the most venerable person I ever beheld. His height exceeded six feet; and until recently, whether sitting or standing, he was commonly erect, and always when in full flow. His head and chest were on a large scale, and his vast blue eye, which always seemed to gaze afar, was aptly termed by Wirt an "eye of ocean." In early youth he was uncommonly handsome. In middle life he was very thin though lithe and strong, with a face the outline of which is very like that of Lord Mansfield. But for the last thirty-five years, the period during which I have been familiar with his person, all those traces of early beauty which had marked his youthful face, and which in middle life may be seen in the portrait of Thompson, had disappeared, and he was altogether on a more developed scale. His stature had become large, his features were massive, his silver hair fell in ringlets about his neck, and his bearing was grave, and with strangers, until the ice was broken, almost stern; and he appeared with a majesty which filled the most careless spectator with veneration and awe. And when we add to these the overshadowing reputation universally accorded him, we can readily imagine the solicitude with which the most eminent of his contemporaries approached him for the first time. But beneath the cold surface flowed a warm and cordial current of generous feeling, or, as John Randolph said to Mercer, "his ice rested on a volcano;" and the firm grasp of the hand, the ready talk on any topic of the time, the quick illustration which was so frequently borrowed from some characteristic or incident in the life of the person, or the person's ancestor, with whom he was conversing, the eloquent disquisition playful or profound, put the visitor at his ease, and hours flew like minutes in refreshing talk. It was a mistake to suppose that Mr. Tazewell arrogated all the talk to himself, and purposely kept others silent in his company. On the contrary, he delighted in colloquial discourse, and listened with rapt attention to all that was said; and was then more brilliant and entertaining than ever in argument, or narrative, or repartee; and on such occasions he was a most instructive and entertaining companion. I remember his encountering at dinner-table several gallant captains of the navy on the subject of the movements of a ship under certain relations of wind and tide; and although the naval gentlemen combated his position with much boldness and skill, he worked his ship, at least in the opinion of the landsmen who were present, safely into her destined harbor. It was from the fear which even able men felt in his presence, and which made them averse to venture their remarks, that from pure good nature Mr. Tazewell sought to entertain and instruct them in detail on any topic of the time; though it was plain that he courted inquiry and remark, which to a certain extent was necessary to the full and pleasant exercise of his faculties. But it was infinitely amusing to hear him banter an obstinate old lawyer on a point of law, catching at his arguments before he had half uttered them, and dissecting them with such wonderful dexterity that the listeners, shaking with laughter, saw, probably for the first time, that the severest logic and the deepest learning became in his hands the source of the keenest wit and of the broadest humor. What was conspicuous to all who had frequent opportunities of seeing Mr. Tazewell in his own house or in the house of a friend was, that he had no set topics. His range of reading and observation had been so wide, his knowledge of men and things was so vast, his faculties of combination were so active, it was impossible to state a question to be decided by precedent or reasoning, which he could not instantly handle with a force of logic which most men could only have reached by deliberate preparation. But all that humor and wit and genius are gone: that stream of talk has ceased to flow; and on leaving the study, where for so many years he delighted his hearers by acts of personal kindness and instructed them by his wisdom, we pass into another room—the saddest of all—the chamber of Death.
There, in, that room above the parlor, on the bright Sabbath morning of May the sixth, at twenty-five minutes past ten, he breathed his last. He was slightly indisposed the Monday previous; but until the evening of that day he did not appear to be seriously ill. He complained of no particular pain, but of a general restlessness andmalaise. On Friday, two days before his death, seated in his chair as the easiest position he could obtain, he engaged in a game of chess with a friend; but his tremulous hand refused to make the moves, which were made by another at his suggestion, and were recorded by one of his daughters. He was too weak, however, to finish the game, which was postponed with his consent to another time. It was now plain that his disease, which was pneumonia, could not be conquered, and that his end was nigh. On Saturday morning his faculties became clouded. He was heard to call a long lost son by the name known only to the family; then the name of his dear departed wife was uttered; and presently the name of the master of the steamer that plies between Norfolk and the Eastern Shore where that son and that wife were buried; showing that his own burial by their side was passing in dim review before his failing faculties. In the course of Saturday his mind was wholly gone. On Sunday morning, a quarter after ten, he drew a long breath, and it was thought that all was over; but he rallied, and another long inspiration followed. And then all was still. His spirit had passed away. An hour later I entered the chamber, and took a seat by the side of the corpse. His hands were folded on his chest, which loomed larger than in life; and his extended form looked like one of those marble effigies which adorn the tombs of his Norman sires. His features appeared full and natural as if a deep sleep had come upon him. The massy forehead, the firm aquiline nose, the wide reliant upper lip which looked as I have so often seen it when about to put forth a serious utterance, and the broad chin—all were there as in life; and even his silver hair, curled freshly by daughter's fingers, clustered about his neck and brow. The "ocean eye" alone was closed. Death had put his seal upon it. As I gazed upon that majestic form reft of its mighty spirit and soon to be laid away forever, and as I pressed the parting salutation upon those lips not yet cold in death, on which admiring Senates have so often hung, and from which I had so often heard the words of wisdom and affection, I thought of those who were bathing his dust with their tears—of the kindest and tenderest of fathers, and of the bravest and best of friends; and I wept as I felt that a large and various chapter of my own humble life, written all over with the memories of this illustrious man,—a chapter running from early youth to grey hairs—would thenceforth be closed evermore. It was only when the flood was past, that I thought of our common country.
His time had come. He had disappeared from our sight to take his place in history. He had attained an age almost double that which his father had reached when that honored statesman fell in a distant city in the service of his country; and he had been blessed with a larger share of health than usually attends extreme old age. His faculties, which had kindled the admiration of our fathers, shone bright to the last. His children had reached maturity, and watched and cheered with tender care his failing hours; and with each revolving morn his numerous grandchildren came with their infantile ways to win the blessing of their ancestor. Had he lived, he could not have performed any public service. The voice whose tones had so often echoed in the forum was gone, and his feeble limbs could no longer bear his weight. His duty was done. His orations for the crown had all been delivered; and that crown had been won and worn for half a century with the modesty which became a wise and virtuous statesman of a republic; and when it was about to be taken from his brow to be garnered for the coming ages, its flowers were fresh, and, like those which the muse of Milton strewed about the walks of Eden, were without a thorn. He had run a long and glorious course. His duty was all done. He had taken his place in the history of his country.
In the contemplation of such a character, when the keen pang of parting is past, joy should take the place of mourning. Let us rejoice at the prospect which greeted his closing eyes. In his last days he was cheered by the greatness of his country. When he first saw the light, his beloved Virginia was indeed bounded by the Ohio, and had a nominal line on the Mississippi, the extreme verge of the British claim; but she was the humble vassal of imperial power. He saw that Virginia, when, retiring from the Danube of the West, she gave independence and position to that lovely region, which, under the name of Kentucky, became her equal in the federal union. He saw that Virginia, beneath the banner of the gallant Clark, dipping her feet in the waters of the Northern lakes; and he saw her cede to the confederation that vast North-western domain with the single provision that states as free and as sovereign as herself should be carved from its territory; and he saw those states, one by one, take their station in the American Union. When he was born, the flag of Britain streamed from the old Capitol in his native city, and flapped above his head; and in the South the St. Mary's was the extreme limit of British territory. He lived to see that flag the trophy of his country, and to see the stars and stripes wave above the waters of the Mexican gulf, and over those of the Atlantic and Pacific seas. He lived to see our numbers swell from three millions to more than thirty-one millions; and our commerce which at his birth was confined to a few ports of Britain float on every sea, and freighted with the wealth of every clime. He saw our extended country flourishing, beyond the example of so young a nation in ancient or in modern times, in the arts and sciences, in knowledge and in power and in true religion. And, with such a scene before him, he closed his eyes in peace.
Let us remember ourselves, and inculcate upon our children the lessons of so august a life. Let us point them to his pure and studious youth, and his love of those who taught him, weeping at the age of eight in parting from his young tutor, whom he was to meet again; and later as his rival and equal at the bar; and later still when both, having attained the highest honors of the profession, had retired from its walks; and later still, when half a century had elapsed, he closed a tender and life-long friendship at his grave. Let us point to him, unguarded by a parent's care from his third year, that parent one of the master-spirits of a great Revolution and ever absent in his fearful work, remarkable for his correct deportment and that perseverance in well-doing so strikingly shown by the fact that he, alone among his young contemporaries, finished his studies at college with the approbation of the faculty, and received the only degree conferred upon his class. Let us point our youth to the zeal with which he sought instruction in useful knowledge; how, a mere boy, almost imperceptibly, it may be in the office of his grandfather, or of Mr. Wythe, or of Mr. Wickham, or of the General Court, but some how, somewhere, perhaps drawn on the instant from the philosophy of the law, he acquired a thorough knowledge of all the mysteries and learning of a clerk of a court—a mastery so thorough, that in after years he was consulted by the most eminent clerks in difficult cases in their calling; and how he not only mastered that department of knowledge, but studied its mere mechanical details, and learned that beautiful hand which was conspicuous in all his writings. Let us recall to them the industry with which he, the heir-apparent of a fortune, which, however, he never received, pursued the study of the law; how, by his moral purity, his intelligence, and his becoming deportment, he won, a mere youth, the confidence and the intimacy of some of the most distinguished men of that age; and how he heeded the lessons which he heard from their lips, and imitated the singular virtues which shone in their lives. Let us recall the fact, so patent in his life, and so cheering to the young and virtuous of every land, that moral worth and abilities will ever be promptly recognized by those true patrons of the age—the People—who took the young Tazewell in charge, who, at the age of one-and-twenty, sent him to the Assembly, and who, as soon as he was eligible to a seat in the House of Representatives, conferred upon him that most distinguished honor in their gift and placed him in the chair of John Marshall. Let us call the attention of our young men to the next great step in his life, when, having obtained the highest political honors which could be conferred on so young a man, realizing that a competent fortune was the solid basis of independence moral and political, and that the family hearth was the true home of human happiness; he let the cup of ambition pass from him, and devoted himself to the practical business of life. And then let us unfold before our youth his splendid career at the bar—a career radiant with genius, marked by untiring industry and fidelity to the interests confided to his care, brilliant with extraordinary displays of intellect, upheld by dauntless courage, memorable as well by his triumphant successes as by the moderation of his fees and by the moral light which he diffused around him, regarding, as he ever did, rapacity, extortion, and complicity in evil-doing as the worst of crimes, and more memorable, as blending in a single character, and at an early age, those uncommon qualities which separately make the reputation of a great advocate, of a great civilian, and of a great master of the Laws of Nations; and, more memorable still, when, his high position attained, and able to add thousands upon thousands to his wealth, he, with noble self-denial, put another enticing cup away from his lips, and withdrew with a moderate competence only to the bosom of his family and to the peaceful pursuits of agriculture, leaving, as an example worthy of all imitation, a broad margin which Plutus might have condemned, but which Socrates, Cato, and Cicero would have extolled, between the bar of man and that supreme tribunal before which we must all appear; how, when in the retirement which he so much loved, his country called for his services, he promptly and generously rendered them, serving a long term of years, speaking, accustomed as he was to speak, rarely, but effectively and conclusively, so that nothing was to be said after him, and winning laurels for himself in the high places of the land, and from the foremost spirits of the age—laurels whose only worth in his eyes was that he might lay them at the feet of that blessed mother of us all, our beloved Virginia; how, when he had performed long and distinguished service abroad, which Virginia and the whole country were anxious to reward, he again sought retirement, relinquishing without a sigh to others those personal honors which so fascinate the votaries of ambition, but which had no charm for him; how, when he had formed with the utmost deliberation his political creed, he adhered most closely and conscientiously, and in the face of great temptations, to its cardinal doctrines throughout his entire course; yet, throning country above party in the empire of his affections, he did not hesitate to oppose as readily and as fearlessly his political friends when he deemed them wrong as he sustained them when he believed them to be right; how, though a stern upholder of the public honor, he ever sought to avoid war, when it was consistent with the public interests to defer it, and, in 1807, when a false step on his part would have brought on an instant rupture with Great Britain, he, with consummate tact and courage, poured oil upon the troubled waters, and averted a war which, under the circumstances, would have been worse than a civil war—bellum plus quam civile—a war to the knife; how, at a later day, when, on the eve of the conclusion of the war in Europe, it was resolved to commence hostilities with England, he sought to postpone the struggle for a season, convinced that a short delay would render it unnecessary, and how signally his foresight was justified by the result; thus recommending, in opposition to the pervading sentiment of the State, a policy which would have saved thousands of valuable lives, and a hundred millions of money, expended in our contest with England; how, at a still later day, when the Senate of the United States, unconsciously and needlessly, were about to involve us in a war with Spain, his eloquence rescued the country from the impending danger; yet, when war was declared against his will, ever ready to unite with his countrymen in prosecuting hostilities with the greatest vigor; how, alone among all the departed statesmen of Virginia, he managed, with the industry and attention of an ordinary citizen, his private affairs, into which he introduced a system which the planter and the merchant might wisely imitate, and which enabled him to compete with his most skilful contemporaries in the success which followed all his exertions; how, unseduced by a love of gold in an age of speculation, he never committed a dollar to the caprices of fortune, or lost an investment; how, though affluent with wealth, won mainly by downright industry, and waxing greater every hour by the force of that wondrous element in the accumulation of money, a lengthened lapse of years, he constantly and steadily turned his back upon the extravagance and social follies of the day, and exhibited in his household and in his life those stern and sterling virtues of prudence, economy, and thrift, which were the characteristics of the early fathers of the republic; displaying before the eyes of the people a model wherein the loftiest genius, the most varied and profound learning, the most fervid patriotism ever sinking self in country, the severe simplicity and frugality which should ever shine along the track of a true republican statesman, and an escutcheon undebased by a solitary vice, were united in all their fair and grand proportions; how, in his happy home, he dispensed, freely and without price, the marvellous stores of learning and experience which he had amassed during his long and eventful career, turning his modest study into a chamber of philosophy, and the well-spring of oracles more practical, more prudent, more profound, and penetrating further into the abyss of the dark and illimitable future than were ever uttered at the Pythian fane; and last, though not least, how, in the lingering twilight of his years as in their earliest dawn, he loved Virginia, not with that cold feeling which looks to latitude and longitude, to East or to West, as the limits of affection, but, first, in that tender and household light, as the home of his ancestry, the sepulchre of his sires, his own birth and burial-place, and the birth and burial-place of those who were dear to him, and then in that more majestic aspect as the bride of liberty, the first born of the colonies of Britain, and the first born of the States of the new world, as the mother of heroes, statesmen, and philosophers, "above all Greek, above all Roman fame," as the sole mistress of his heart, valuing her humblest commission, whether stamped by the greater or the lesser seal, above the highest honors which a federal executive could bestow, or the most gorgeous transcript of imperial praise, as a free, puissant, and perfect commonwealth, as an integral, independent, and sovereign State, as independent, as sovereign, as when she struck the lion with his senseless motto from her flag, and placed in their stead her own Virtue, erect, with a helmet on her head, a spear in her hand, and a fallen crown at her feet, and that ever dear and ever living sentiment, "Sic semper tyrannis," and especially and touchingly, with unutterable and inextinguishable affection, as the beneficent parent who had rocked his cradle, who had held out to him in youth the helping hand, who had honored his meridian and his setting years with her greenest bays, and who as he humbly and fondly hoped, would drop a tear upon his tomb, and hold his name not unworthy of her remembrance. Let us, gentlemen, recall these and similar traits of this illustrious man, and holding up before posterity his pure and bright example, let us not only honor it with our tongues, but imprint it on our hearts, and imitate it in our lives.