that table, in an arm-chair, he commonly
sate in cold weather; and the chances were, at least during the morning,
you would find him pen in hand, and sheets of paper freshly written and
full of figures strewn about him. It was rare that you saw any thing
like continuous writing except in the case of a letter. He delighted in
calculations, which kept his mind sweet and clear. At his left hand, and
a little behind him, was a small bookcase containing about two hundred
volumes, neatly bound, of the English classics, all printed forty years
ago and more, the very pith and quintessence of the philosophy, the
politics, the literature of all ages strained through the alembic of the
Anglo-Saxon mind. The office opened by a large folding-door into the
capacious dining-room where the family usually sate, and where he
lingered after each meal, talking, or reading the day's paper, which he
took in to the last, as if loth to retire to his own particular den. In
summer he sate in the passage, or on the broad tessellated pavement of
the portico. On the right hand on entering the front door you saw a
small room in which an aged or invalid guest might repose without
ascending the stairway, and in which Gen. Jackson and Mr. Randolph
lodged at various times. And adjoining this room was the parlor, a
single room of twenty by twenty, containing probably the same furniture
he purchased when he first went to housekeeping, all plain now, though
elegant in its day, and thoroughly kept; and suspended from the walls of
the room were the portraits of his father, Judge Tazewell, a handsome
youth of one-and-twenty though a married man at that age, and his
bride, a sweet face almost perfectly reflected in the features of one of
his own daughters, both well executed by the elder Peale, and in good
preservation. There, too, were the portraits of Col. Nivison and his
wife, the parents of Mrs. Tazewell; of Mr. Tazewell himself by Thompson,
the most intellectual and lifelike of all his portraits, taken at the
age of forty-two; of his wife's two sisters, who were the beauties and
the belles of forty-five years ago, and who have long passed away, and
of their brother, the amiable and beloved William Nivison, whose early
death was long deplored by our people. The general library of Mr.
Tazewell was kept in a separate building, and consisted of his numerous
law books, of the British statutes at large in many thick quartos, and
most of the writers of Queen Anne