o is faithless to the God of his fathers
can never be faithful to his country." And now, when the day of ambition
with me is long past and gone, and when that day of retribution, which,
as it cometh to all, so it shall come to us, is drawing nigh, I may say
that it ever has been my fervent and steadfast prayer to be able to
illustrate in my humble life the precept of my pious friend.

There was another lawyer, the junior of Nimmo by five years, whose
subsequent intimate connexion with Mr. Tazewell makes it proper to
recall his position here. The name of Col. JOHN NIVISON was pronounced
with pride by our fathers, and deserves to be held in grateful
remembrance. None under seventy can recall him as he pleaded at the bar;
and none under fifty, and very few of that age, can recall him as he sat
in the chair of the Recorder. That office was justly held in high repute
in olden time. Sir John Randolph held it; and at a later day it was held
by the celebrated Edmund Randolph, the great grandson of the knight, and
by the eloquent and accomplished Henry Tazewell. Then it was usually
bestowed upon some prominent lawyer who had retired from the bar, and
within my recollection it has ever been held by upright, intelligent,
and honorable men. I see this old man, too, with the freshness of the
passing hour, as he was driving out in his capacious chariot to
Lawson's, or as he strolled or rather rocked along the sidewalk. He was
very large, weighing between two and three hundred, and was nearly six
feet in height. He said he had no idea of his bulk until, passing a
negro woman in the street with a basket on her head who took a side
glance at him, he heard her unconsciously exclaim: "Good gracious, what
a big white man!" He was born in 1760, in Brunswick as Brunswick then
was, was educated at William and Mary, while Wythe was professor of law,
having as his college associates John Marshall, Spencer Roane, the
amiable and patriotic Samuel Hardy, who was destined to fall too soon,
and at whose grave Virginia sat in mourning, Archibald Stuart, Bushrod
Washington, William Short, our Minister to Spain, _et alii haud
impares_: was one of the founders of the Phi Beta Kappa Society--an
institution which will make his name immortal--and began the practice of
the law in his native county. After the peace of 1783, he took up his
abode in Portsmouth, where he reached the head of the bar; and in the
great hegira from that town on the adoption of the f