The great age attained by Mr. Tazewell makes us curious to know his modes of life and his habits of study.  In youth and early manhood he was fond of athletic sports and of horsemanship; and he must have possessed great muscular power.  As late as 1802 he accomplished on horseback a trip of a hundred and odd miles in as short a time as that distance was ever travelled in Virginia.  His form was most symmetrical; and he had the broad chest and the well-proportioned neck that are so often seen in those who enjoy a healthful and protracted old age; and that small wrist and hand that told of his Norman blood.  From the time when he became engrossed in business, it is probable that he rarely took any other exercise than was inevitable in passing to his various courts; and since his retirement from the bar, except during his trips to the Eastern Shore and to Washington and Richmond, he seldom walked more than a few hundred yards in twenty-four hours.  Yet, throughout his career, he enjoyed fair health, and during the last forty years, when, as man and boy, I have observed him, he has not had more than one really serious spell of illness—­a pleuritic attack, which he encountered in Washington.  In that interval he has contracted several bilious diseases; but they soon passed off, and were not thought dangerous.  The secret of his exemption from disease, apart from the healthful structure of his frame, was the extreme temperance and the regularity of his habits.  At first sight he would seem the most irregular of men, sitting up till two or three in the morning and rising late; but, in fact, this habit, persisted in for so many years, became fixed; and, as nature requires regular periods of rest rather than any special time for taking it, he suffered no material inconvenience in that respect.  But his main source of exemption from sickness was his temperance in eating.  I had an opportunity of seeing him daily at every meal for many weeks, and he ate more sparingly than any one of those who sate at the table with him.  He generally took a glass of toddy or a glass of wine at dinner; and the only form in which he used tobacco was in chewing.  If he ever went into excess in any thing it was in the use of tobacco; but he never appeared to me to err above ordinary chewers even in that way, though I have heard one of his clerks say that he could always tell the dignity of a case by the size of the chew which Tazewell put into his mouth when he took it up for the first time.  His usual remedy for indisposition was strict abstinence from food, which he could endure as heroically as a Brahmin, or a disciple of Mahomet.