ch he
reached it. If his speeches such as they are, his reports on public
questions, his legal opinions, his essays and tracts on political and
historical topics, and his private letters, were collected together, the
variety of his powers and his singular abilities would strike every
reader; and that his works ought to be preserved in volumes is a matter
of public interest and is due to his memory.

I have said that Mr. Tazewell should not be considered as a mere
scholar, a mere lawyer, or a mere statesman, but in that most august of
all characters, the citizen of a commonwealth. But to show what manner
of man he was to my younger friends, let us regard him in the aspect of
a lawyer, and as he stood in the three great departments of his
profession. In criminal law he was easily the first. It was the opinion
of a gentleman, his early contemporary at the bar, who has united in
his own person in a more eminent degree than was ever before known in
Virginia the rare qualities of a writer on metaphysics, history, and
literature,--an opinion expressed to me since the death of
Tazewell,--that he was the ablest criminal lawyer of his age, and that
he would sooner confide an important criminal case to him than to any
other living man. This is but an echo of his general reputation in this
department of the law. Analyze the qualities necessary to form a great
criminal lawyer--his various power of speech, his skill in the
evisceration of facts, his tact and ability in arranging the best line
of defence possible in the case, the skill in addressing the jury, and
the skill, of a different sort, in addressing the court, his superior
generalship in the conflicting and unexpected developments during a
trial which threaten instant defeat, his fearlessness, and that perfect
self-possession which not only conceals his own fears and weaknesses,
but avails itself of the fears and weaknesses of others, and of that
deep insight into human passions, penetrating far beyond the eye, or the
ear, or the ordinary reason: count the attainments which such a man must
possess to win supremacy in such a sphere, and we must assent to the
general opinion which places supremacy in such a sphere one of the
highest achievements of human intellect and character. Then contemplate
that excellence which is shown in the conduct of civil cases as
contradistinguished from criminal--that various power here, too, of
speech, in itself the lesson of a life to learn--the