as stuffed with
book-learning. My friend, W.R. Johnson, has many a groom
that can clean and dress a racehorse, and ride him too,
better than he can."

He made the sweeping assertion, that no man had ever presided over a
government with advantage to the country governed, who had not in him
the making of a good general; for, said he, "the talent for government
lies in these two things,--sagacity to perceive, and decision to act."
Really, when we read this ingenious apology for, or rather eulogy of,
ignorance, we cease to wonder that General Jackson should have sent
him to Russia.

The religious life of Randolph is a most curious study. He experienced
in his lifetime four religious changes, or conversions. His gentle
mother, whose name he seldom uttered without' adding with tender
emphasis, "God bless her!" was such a member of the Church of England
as gentle ladies used to be before an "Evangelical" party was known in
it. She taught his infant lips to pray; and, being naturally trustful
and affectionate, he was not an unapt pupil. But in the library of the
old mansion on the Appomattox, in which he passed his forming years,
there was a "wagon-load" of what he terms "French infidelity," though
it appears there were almost as many volumes of Hobbes, Shaftesbury,
Collins, Hume, and Gibbon, as there were of Diderot, D'Alembert,
Helvetius, and Voltaire. These works he read in boyhood; and when he
came to mingle among men, he found that the opinions of such authors
prevailed in the circles which he most frequented. Just as he, a
natural tory, caught some tincture of republicanism from Jefferson and
his friends, so he, the natural believer, adopted the fashion of
scepticism, which then ruled the leading minds of all lands; and just
as he lapsed back into toryism when the spell which drew him away from
it had spent its force, so he became, in the decline of his powers, a
prey to religious terrors. For twenty-two years, as we have said, he
held aloof from religion, its ministers, and its temples. The disease
that preyed upon him so sharpened his temper, and so perverted his
perceptions of character, that, one after another, he alienated all
the friends and relations with whom he ought to have lived; and he
often found himself, between the sessions of Congress, the sole white
tenant of his lonely house at Roanoke,--the sick and solitary
patriarch of a family of three hundred persons. He sought to alleviate
this ho