aid,
in his old age, with his vast stores of learning and experience unrolled
before him, the most elaborate and conclusive exposition which that
system ever received; his course on the restrictive policy and on the
removal of the deposits, irrespective as it was whether he carried along
with him one or a thousand of his associates, shows that on great
questions involving mere expediency he would burst the trammels of
party, and act with his old and inveterate opponents against the darling
measures of his political friends. I have said that he was not, and
could not well be, in a series of years, the unvarying adjunct of any
party. He looked upon a subject through so many lights,--the lights of
the past, the lights of the present, the lights of the future; he saw
such a tissue of good and evil so inextricably intermingled in human
projects; he saw so much that was questionable in the best party
measures; so much that was not bad in what seemed the worst; and so much
that could be accomplished by doing nothing, that, though he was prompt
above most men in decision, and to the last degree practical, his
enthusiasm was cooled by philosophy, and he was never very much exalted
or depressed by the success or failure of political schemes.

While Mr. Tazewell was engaged in his senatorial career, he was elected
by the Norfolk district a member of the Convention which assembled in
Richmond on the fifth day of October, 1829, to revise the first
Constitution of Virginia. The character of that body is familiar to all;
some of the most illustrious names recorded in our annals were inscribed
upon its rolls,--Madison, Marshall, Monroe, Watkins Leigh, Charles
Fenton Mercer, Chapman Johnson, Philip Doddridge, Robert Stanard, Philip
P. Barbour, Morris, Fitzhugh, Baldwin, Scott, Cooke--that wonderful man
whose train was always tracked by fire, John Randolph, and a host of
younger statesmen who have since risen to eminence, and who, like their
elder colleagues, have, I am grieved to think, nearly all passed away,
were among the members, and were engaged day after day, for three months
and a half, in performing the office which their country had committed
to their hands. The most distinguished men of the Union,--statesmen
whose own names were historical, men of letters, merchants who
remembered that the wealth of the counting-room and the wealth of
statesmanship were indissolubly bound together, old planters, clever
young men from Virginia