e period
commencing with the revolution in England, and ending with the
establishment of the new government here; excepting the Acts for
regulating descents, for religious freedom, and for proportioning
crimes and punishments. In 1777, he was chosen speaker of the House
of Delegates, being of distinguished learning in parliamentary law and
proceedings; and towards the end of the same year, he was appointed one
of the three Chancellors, to whom that department of the Judiciary
was confided, on the first organization of the new government. On a
subsequent change of the form of that court, he was appointed sole
Chancellor, in which office he continued to act until his death, which
happened in June, 1806, about the seventy-eighth or seventy-ninth year
of his age.

Mr. Wythe had been twice married; first, I believe, to a daughter of
Mr. Lewis, with whom he had studied law, and afterwards, to a Miss
Taliaferro, of a wealthy and respectable family in the neighborhood of
Williamsburg; by neither of whom did he leave issue.

No man ever left behind him a character more venerated than George
Wythe. His virtue was of the purest tint; his integrity inflexible,
and his justice exact; of warm patriotism, and, devoted as he was to
liberty, and the natural and equal rights of man, he might truly be
called the Cato of his country, without the avarice of the Roman; for a
more disinterested person never lived. Temperance and regularity in all
his habits, gave him general good health, and his unaffected modesty and
suavity of manners endeared him to every one. He was of easy elocution,
his language chaste, methodical in the arrangement of his matter,
learned and logical in the use of it, and of great urbanity in debate;
not quick of apprehension, but, with a little time, profound in
penetration, and sound in conclusion. In his philosophy he was firm,
and neither troubling, nor perhaps trusting, any one with his religious
creed, he left the world to the conclusion, that that religion must be
good which could produce a life of exemplary virtue.

His stature was of the middle size, well formed and proportioned, and
the features of his face were manly, comely, and engaging. Such was
George Wythe, the honor of his own, and the model of future times.

[NOTE B.]--Letter to Samuel A. Wells, Esq.

Sir,

Monticello, May 12, 1829.

An absence, of sometime, at an occasional and distant residence, must
apologize for the delay in acknow