all, Leigh, Johnson, Stanard, Harvie, and others whom I have seen
at his hospitable board; when I recall that living galaxy of beauty
which flashed in his thronged halls, and of which the sweetest and the
brightest were his own household stars,--now, alas! extinct and gone;
and his own noble presence and demeanor, which drew from the spoiled and
fastidious poet Moore the expression of his admiration and applause, it
is with feelings of deep and tender regard, and of grateful veneration,
that I offer this tribute to his memory.

The question has often been asked whether Mr. Tazewell was fond of
literature and had the elements of a literary man. His early
opportunities were not favorable for acquiring a profound knowledge of
classical learning. In his day Latin and Greek, the foundation of all
true taste in letters, were not taught in William and Mary at all,
except in the grammar school. That Tazewell knew enough of Latin to
translate easily a Latin author, and even to write the language
grammatically, is certain; but that he never rose to that excellence in
those tongues to which his old tutor Mr. Wythe attained is equally
certain. But of English literature he had drunk deeply. He had Bacon,
Locke, Burke, Pope, Shakspeare, Swift, Hume, Gibbon, Johnson, Gillies,
Addison, and Roscoe, within three feet of his elbow for the last forty
years of his life. In English political history, such as might be
gathered from the ordinary historians, and from such books as Baker's
Chronicle and Rushworth, he was profoundly skilled. The history of the
law from the days of Magna Charta to the passage of the reform bill of
Earl Grey's administration, was the study of his whole professional and
public life. He not only knew every leading event, every great statute,
but he had the minutest details at command, and was always pleased to
descant upon a British statute, or on an epoch of British legislation.
The excellent volumes of Lord Chancellor Campbell have made a knowledge
of the history of the law an easy accomplishment; but Tazewell never
read them, and drew his information from the original sources. In the
history of Virginia he was, without exception, the greatest proficient
of his time. Whatever was told by Smith, Beverly, Keith, Stith, and Burk
with his continuators, or by Hening in the statutes at large, or in the
journals of the House of Burgesses and of the House of Delegates, or
could be gathered from the living voice for eighty y