us to the heart of this
mystery. He could not have correctly answered the question we have
proposed, but he _was_ an answer to it. Born when George Washington,
Thomas Jefferson, George Mason, and James Madison were Virginia
farmers, and surviving to the time when Andrew Jackson was President
of the United States, he lived through the period of the decline of
his race, and he was of that decline a conscious exemplification. He
represented the decay of Virginia, himself a living ruin attesting by
the strength and splendor of portions of it what a magnificent
structure it was once. "Poor old Virginia! Poor old Virginia!" This
was the burden of his cry for many a year. Sick, solitary, and half
mad, at his lonely house in the wilderness of Roanoke, suffering from
inherited disease, burdened with inherited debt, limited by inherited
errors, and severed by a wall of inherited prejudice from the life of
the modern world, he stands to us as the type of the palsied and dying
State. Of the doctrine of States' Rights he was the most consistent
and persistent champion; while of that feeling which the North
Carolina Reader No. III. styles "State pride," we may call him the
very incarnation. "When I speak of my country," he would say, "I mean
the Commonwealth of Virginia." He was the first eminent man in the
Southern States who was prepared in spirit for war against the
government of the United States; for daring the Nullification
imbroglio of 1833, he not only was in the fullest accord with Calhoun,
but he used to say, that, if a collision took place between the
nullifiers and the forces of the United States, he, John Randolph of
Roanoke, old and sick as he was, would have himself buckled on his
horse, Radical, and fight for the South to his last breath.

But then he was a man of genius, travel, and reading. We find him,
therefore, as we have said, a _conscious_ witness of his Virginia's
decline. Along with a pride in the Old Dominion that was fanatical,
there was in this man's heart a constant and most agonizing sense of
her inferiority to lands less beloved. By no tongue or pen--not by
Summer's tongue nor. Olmstead's pen--have more terrible pictures been
drawn of Virginia's lapse into barbarism, than are to be found in John
Randolph's letters. At a time (1831) when he would not buy a
pocket-knife made in New England, nor send a book to be bound north of
the Potomac, we find him writing of his native State in these terms:--