fforts on
such occasions; and all who heard it pronounced it a wonderful work of
argument, eloquence, and declamation combined. A few days after the
meeting, Mr. Tazewell was elected Governor of the Commonwealth.

The conduct of Mr. Tazewell on this occasion I leave to history. It was
my misfortune to differ from him, and to strive against him in public
meetings, by resolutions, by speeches, and by essays in the public
prints, and to have been on the side of the victorious party; and I owe
it to candor to say that, after a deliberate investigation of the
arguments and the circumstances of that time with such faculties as God
has bestowed upon me, my views through the twenty-seven years that have
since passed remain unaltered; but now that my illustrious friend is
gone, and as I measure that chasm which his death has made in the
Commonwealth, leaving none equal to him or like him behind, and
especially in my own bosom--a chasm which, at my time of life, can
never, never be closed--I have looked with fear and trembling over all I
said and wrote on that occasion, and I am gratified to find that,
although I spoke with as great freedom of men and things as the
occasion, in my opinion, demanded, I spoke personally of Mr. Tazewell as
a son should speak of a father, and with that exalted respect with which
I ever regarded his colossal character.

Still, if Mr. Tazewell had been a man of narrow mind, our friendship
would have ended, and the instruction and delight which I have derived
from his conversation for the last twenty-seven years--a period in which
I have doubled my own age--would have been lost. But, independent
himself, and the proudest man I ever knew when the faintest shadow of
vassalage was sought to be cast upon him, he valued independence in
others, and his wide experience taught him that the friend who would not
hesitate to stand up firmly against him when he thought him wrong, would
be the last to skulk from his side in the hour of danger, and from the
defence of his memory when his head was low.

While I leave the wisdom of his course in relation to the deposit
question and in the executive chair of the commonwealth to the award of
history, I recall one lesson which may be read from his acts, which is,
that he never was, strictly speaking, a party man; that while he held to
his dying day the theory of our federal system which he had adopted in
his youth, and in defence of which he prepared, as has just been s