Above all, he has seen and sees a standard of intelligence, high-breeding, and piety pervading the entire State.  The log-cabin gives way to the comfortable mansion, the broad fields usurping the forest’s claim, and the beautiful church-building pointing its taper spire up to heaven, where stood the rude log-house, and where first he preached.  He has lived on and watched this growing moral and physical beauty, whose germs he planted, and whose fruits he is now enjoying in the eighty-fourth year of his age, still zealous, still ardent and eloquent, and a power in the land.  Should these lines ever meet his eye, he will know that the child whose head he stroked as he sat upon his knee—­the youth whom he warned and counselled, loves him yet, now that he is wrinkled, old, and gray.

From parents such as I have described, and under the teaching of such men, grew up the remarkable men who have shed such lustre upon the State of Georgia.

The great distinguishing feature of these men was that of the masses of her people—­stern honesty.  Many families have been and continue to be remarkable for their superior talents and high character; preserving in a high degree the prestige of names made famous by illustrious ancestry.  The Crawfords, the Cobbs, and the Lamars are perhaps the most remarkable.

Thomas W. Cobb, so long distinguished in the councils of the nation, and as an able and honest jurist in Georgia, was the son of John Cobb, and grandson of Thomas Cobb, of the County of Columbia, in the State of Georgia.  His grandfather emigrated from Virginia at an early day, when Georgia was comparatively a wilderness, and selecting this point, located with a large family, which through his remarkable energy he reared and respectably educated.  This was an achievement, as the facilities for education were so few and difficult as to make it next to impossible to educate even tolerably the youth of that day.  This remarkable man lived to see his grandson, Thomas W. Cobb, among the most distinguished men of the State.  He died at the great age of one hundred and fifteen years, at the home of his selection, in Columbia County, the patriarch pioneer of the country, surrounded by every comfort, and a family honoring his name and perpetuating his virtues; and after he had seen the rude forest give way to the cultivated field, and the almost as rude population to the cultivated and intellectual people distinguishing that county.

Thomas W. Cobb, in his education, suffered the penalties imposed in this particular by a new country; his opportunities, however, were improved to their greatest possible extent, and he continued to improve in learning to the day of his death.  In boyhood he ploughed by day, and studied his spelling-book and arithmetic by night—­lighting his vision to the pursuit of knowledge by a pine-knot fire.  This ambition of learning, with close application, soon distinguished him above the youth of the neighborhood, and lifted