for repose in old age,--he
would have accumulated the most colossal fortune which has ever been
made by forensic exertions at the American or the English bar. Now this
very aspect of the life of Mr. Tazewell strikes me, and I feel assured
will appear to posterity, as the most imposing, the most eloquent, and
the most sublime picture in his various career. When he retired he was
not wealthy, according to our present standard of wealth, and he had
several children born to him after his retirement; yet, with enormous
wealth within his grasp, and a moderate competency only in hand, he
withdrew from the field of his fame to the bosom of his family,
thenceforth to draw his living from the moderate profits of agriculture.
I have said that Mr. Tazewell's character was formed in the mould of our
early statesmen; and of all those statesmen there was not one who did
not delight in agriculture as the crowning pleasure and pursuit of life,
and more especially as its shadows were falling low. It was this spirit
which impelled Washington, amid all the magnificence of office when
office was held by such a man, to sigh for the shades of Mount Vernon,
and to prefer the simple employments of the farm, where he might behold,
in the words of the "judicious Hooker," "God's blessing spring out of
our mother earth," above the glory of arms, and the fleeting shadows and
shabby splendors of public office.

But the lesson which the example of Tazewell presents to the American
mind is of yet greater significancy. If there be one unpleasant trait
more revolting than another in our national character, it is the
inordinate pursuit of wealth: _rem, quocunque modo rem_. To get money is
the first lesson of childhood, the engrossing purpose of middle age, and
the harassing employment of declining years. Such is the rabid thirst
for money, its effects are seen over the whole moral and intellectual
character of the people. It constitutes wealth as the standard of worth,
and all the noblest qualities of the head and the heart are despised in
the comparison. As wealth is the point of honor, it must be sought at
every hazard, and the mortifying occurrences of the last twenty years,
the dishonest bankruptcies, the numerous forgeries, perpetrated by the
first people in social position, on a scale never known before, the
innumerable defalcations which have crowded the papers, until they have
become a matter of course; the insatiable craving for the money and
lan