on was forced upon the public mind; if some extraordinary
emergency had presented itself; if he had been called upon to encounter
a national question of the first magnitude, from which others would have
shrunk, and which was susceptible of a definitive adjustment in a given
time, I believe he would have accepted the mission at once. Had Mr.
Madison, on his election to the presidency, called him to the State
Department with a _carte blanche_ as to the terms and mode of settling
the vexed questions which grew out of the Berlin and Milan decrees and
the British orders in council, I do not say that he would have accepted
a seat in the cabinet of a statesman whose election to the presidency he
had opposed,--for I believe he would not; but, if he had accepted it, it
is probable those questions which were afterwards discussed by Mr.
Webster and Lord Ashburton, and which were settled by the treaty of
Washington, would then have received a satisfactory solution. It was
this aspect of Tazewell's character which called from Randolph the
saying in his letter to Gen. Mercer, that, if such a conjuncture in our
affairs were to arise as would call into full play the faculties of
Tazewell, he would be the first man of the nineteenth century.

It has been said by some from whom better things might have been
expected, that Tazewell did not spend his latter years in a manner
altogether worthy of his great talents. To me it appears that such a
sentiment has been expressed without due reflection on all the facts of
the case, and that the retirement of such a man, under all the
circumstances, presents to the contemplative observer one of the
grandest moral spectacles of the age. We have seen that he retired from
the active employment of the bar in his 45th or 46th year, merely
following up afterwards to the appellate courts some important cases
which he had discussed in the lower. At that time he stood almost
without a rival in his profession in Virginia, and, after the death of
Pinkney, in the Supreme Court of the United States; and he might have
received as large an annual income as was ever derived from the practice
of the law in this country; and if he had devoted his time and talents
to his profession for twenty years thereafter--which he might have done,
and yet been younger on leaving off than Webster was when that eminent
lawyer pleaded the great India-rubber case at Trenton, and would still
have had sixteen or eighteen years to spare