skill, too, in
addressing juries and the court with equal effect; that knowledge of the
law in its innumerable doctrines, principles, and decisions, which made
the study even in Lord Coke's day the work of twenty years; the prompt
application of this learning to the rapid matter in hand; the magical
use of the faculties of the mind and the wondrous discipline which they
must have undergone, every hour, every minute demanding a stretch of
thought and an adroitness of discrimination which have justly classed
the dialectics of the bar above all the dialectics of the schools; and
the moral as well as intellectual qualities necessary in an adept in the
varying practice of municipal law; and here, too, we will yield to the
general opinion which places excellence in this single department one of
the highest achievements of mind; and then recall what such a judge as
Spencer Roane, the ablest and sternest judge of the age, and
politically hostile to Tazewell, said when Tazewell pleaded the case of
Long _vs._ Colston before the Court of Appeals. Then let us follow the
profession beyond and above the region of municipal law into the higher
walk of the Laws of Nations, and of that great practical part of those
laws, the law of admiralty. Consider what eminence is, and what it
involves, in this department which the master spirits of ancient as well
as of modern time selected as their peculiar sphere; what the talents
are that may contend with the greatest intellects of the age in that
greatest of all our gladiatorial arenas, the Supreme Court of the United
States, and what various and rare excellencies must unite in forming a
man who may stand forth and share in such generous battle, and, still
more, shall come off victorious from such a field. And when, by blending
all these characters, each great in itself, and worthy of the ambition
of the highest talents and of the longest life, into a single character,
we have made a fame which the grandest intellects of modern times might
glory in attaining, we have but one of the elements, developed during a
comparatively short period only of his career, that make up the
reputation of him whose memory we have met this day to honor.

Then, if you please, regard him as a senator, representing the
sovereignty of Virginia in our more than Amphictyonic Council. Take any
speech which he delivered during his term of service--the speech on the
Bankrupt law; the speech on the Piracy bill, which, as it