a solution than to turn to the books of reports.  Neither at the bar nor in the senate was he fond of quoting authorities; but such as he did quote were of the highest merit, and he made them do him yeoman service.  Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy and Warburton’s Divine Legation of Moses were favorite books with him.  He thought the report of John Quincy Adams on weights and measures one of the ablest works in political literature.

The tendency of his mind and character was wholly practical.  Common sense was his polar star.  He must be judged not as a scholar or a lawyer or a statesman merely, but as a man of business who was required to accomplish a given purpose.  If that purpose was to be accomplished by writing, he took up his pen; if by speech, he rose at the bar and pleaded the case, or in the senate and made a speech.  But when the end was attained he thought no more about the means which he had used in attaining it, whether by writing or speaking, than the carpenter who has finished a house thinks of the scaffolding by which he was enabled to complete it.  Hence Mr. Tazewell never corrected a speech for the press, if we except two instances; and his greatest speeches are either wholly lost, or exist in the merest outline.  But, looking to the result, he was almost invariably successful, at least in the sphere in which he acted; and on the attainment of his purpose forgot the means by which he reached it.  If his speeches such as they are, his reports on public questions, his legal opinions, his essays and tracts on political and historical topics, and his private letters, were collected together, the variety of his powers and his singular abilities would strike every reader; and that his works ought to be preserved in volumes is a matter of public interest and is due to his memory.

I have said that Mr. Tazewell should not be considered as a mere scholar, a mere lawyer, or a mere statesman, but in that most august of all characters, the citizen of a commonwealth.  But to show what manner of man he was to my younger friends, let us regard him in the aspect of a lawyer, and as he stood in the three great departments of his profession.  In criminal law he was easily the first.  It was the opinion of a gentleman, his early contemporary at the bar, who has united in his own person in a more eminent degree than was ever before known in Virginia the rare qualities of a writer on metaphysics, history, and literature,—­an opinion expressed to me since the death of Tazewell,—­that he was the ablest criminal lawyer of his age, and that he would sooner confide an important criminal case to him than to any other living man.  This is but an echo of his general reputation in this department of the law.  Analyze the qualities necessary to form a great criminal lawyer—­his various power of speech, his skill in the evisceration of facts, his tact and ability in arranging the best line of defence possible in the case, the skill in addressing