rner to Hall's. The
waves of recent debate were sweltering in his breast. His person was
erect; his gait was rapid; with one hand he held his cloak in a graceful
fold, and with the other he grasped his ivory curule staff. I thought of
Cicero hastening up the Capitoline hill to announce in the forum the
death of Catiline on the Picenian plain and the slaughter of the
traitor's band.

There were, however, some differences between them, which, or some of
which, observable at first, grew more distinct in the lapse of years, in
their places of nativity, in their temperaments, in their intellectual
traits, and in their politics. Both were partly of Gallic descent; but
here they differed as in other things. Tazewell was French on the
father's side; Taylor on the mother's. Tazewell's ancestors were from
that city on the banks of the Seine in which the piratical Northmen had
dwelt, which they had made the capital of a warlike empire extorted from
one of the drivelling descendants of Charlemagne, and which they had
called by the defiant title of Normandy. Taylor's ancestors belonged to
that pious and not less heroic race, which, under the name of
Huguenots, battled, not for rapine and conquest, but for the rights of
conscience and for a large public liberty, and which, though defeated
and driven from their ancestral land, the beautiful land of the fig, the
olive, and the vine, to the chalky shores of old England, were more than
triumphant in the virtue of their cause. The music familiar to the ears
of Tazewell's ancestors was the wind from the boisterous North Sea and
the turbulent Bay of Biscay; while Taylor's forefathers were refreshed
by the gentle gales of Araby blown across the blue Mediterranean to the
banks of the Rhone. The blood of both had been strongly mixed with the
blood of that Anglo-Saxon race, which, crushed at times, and even for
centuries, was apt to rise again, and build its fortresses to freedom
out of the ruins of the very temples of its oppressors.

Tazewell was born on the north side of the James, Taylor on the south--a
distinction of no little significance in Virginia politics to this very
hour. Tazewell, insensibly imitating those grave old rovers of the sea
whom he counted among his kin, was, even under great provocation, cool
and wary, and only the more dangerous; Taylor, whose southern blood
coursed in torrents of fire through his veins, though at times in the
highest degree self-poised and calm, had