ment to a work on the Laws of Nations, and especially of the
Law of Admiralty, which was the favorite science of his venerable
grandfather, and of which, during the preceding twenty years, he had
obtained so perfect a mastery. He loved the Common Law, revelled in its
subtleties, expounded with a richness and a grace ever to be remembered
the leading statutes by which the wisdom of a thousand years had
controlled or modified it, and gloried in it as the living remembrancer
of the liberties of his ancestral land. But he regarded the law of
admiralty with peculiar and almost hereditary affection. It suited the
caste of his intellect. No ordinary horizon bounded its sphere. It
overlooked the limits of any single realm, however proud that realm
might seem. It was the queen of the sea, whose influence, cast far and
wide over the raging billows, breathed peace and safety to the humblest
sailor who trod a deck, and upheld with all the strength of civilized
man the flag of the feeblest power. Amid the changing revolutions of the
human will, amid the fall of empires and the ruin of dynasties, it alone
was immutable. It was the tie of nations, which bound men in one
universal brotherhood, and gathered peoples about a common altar. No
private rule, no immemorial custom, no formal statute, controlled its
operations; but right reason in all its supremacy enacted its
provisions, and justice, with an even hand, in every dominion and on
every sea under heaven, was its pure and equal administrator. Tazewell
was fond of repeating that eloquent and exact definition of the general
law, which Lord Mansfield, plucking it from the fragments of Cicero's
work on the Republic, has made the household thought of our common
nature: _Non erit alia lex Romae, alia Athenis, alia nunc, alia posthac,
sed et apud omnes gentes et omnia tempora, una eademque lex
obtinebit_.[14] Such a science suited the complexion of Tazewell's
genius; and in his practice he had framed a large and liberal system of
his own. The task would have been a work of love, and would have
required little more than the embodiment of his thoughts on paper. But
the engagements and associations of Southern life are hostile to
authorship, and the fortunate time glided by forever.

A hundred years hence, when Norfolk may or may not have become the
commercial seat of a vast Southern empire; when the face of external
nature in this low region, unmarked by mountain ranges, will be wholly
chan