The question has often been asked whether Mr. Tazewell was fond of literature and had the elements of a literary man.  His early opportunities were not favorable for acquiring a profound knowledge of classical learning.  In his day Latin and Greek, the foundation of all true taste in letters, were not taught in William and Mary at all, except in the grammar school.  That Tazewell knew enough of Latin to translate easily a Latin author, and even to write the language grammatically, is certain; but that he never rose to that excellence in those tongues to which his old tutor Mr. Wythe attained is equally certain.  But of English literature he had drunk deeply.  He had Bacon, Locke, Burke, Pope, Shakspeare, Swift, Hume, Gibbon, Johnson, Gillies, Addison, and Roscoe, within three feet of his elbow for the last forty years of his life.  In English political history, such as might be gathered from the ordinary historians, and from such books as Baker’s Chronicle and Rushworth, he was profoundly skilled.  The history of the law from the days of Magna Charta to the passage of the reform bill of Earl Grey’s administration, was the study of his whole professional and public life.  He not only knew every leading event, every great statute, but he had the minutest details at command, and was always pleased to descant upon a British statute, or on an epoch of British legislation.  The excellent volumes of Lord Chancellor Campbell have made a knowledge of the history of the law an easy accomplishment; but Tazewell never read them, and drew his information from the original sources.  In the history of Virginia he was, without exception, the greatest proficient of his time.  Whatever was told by Smith, Beverly, Keith, Stith, and Burk with his continuators, or by Hening in the statutes at large, or in the journals of the House of Burgesses and of the House of Delegates, or could be gathered from the living voice for eighty years, he knew intimately and could recall at a moment’s notice.  In respect of the political history of the United States from the adoption of the federal constitution to the day of his death, his knowledge was accurate, ready, and profound.  Indeed, if we except the first five years of the federal constitution, it may be said that his actions were a part of that history.  He had discussed, in the House of Delegates, the leading measures of the Washington and Adams administrations, and sixty years ago he sate at a stormy period in the House of Representatives of the United States.

But the excellence of Mr. Tazewell consisted not so much in knowing the acts and thoughts of other men, as in the philosophy which he drew from the great facts in all history.  He was not in the German, or even in the English sense, a reader of many books; but there was hardly a topic of literature or history which he had not studied, and respecting which he had not elaborated a theory of his own.  Even in law he was more apt to work out a question which required