Many to whom the name of Mr. Tazewell is dear would be inclined to know his opinion respecting the religion of Christ.  Far be it from me to intimate in the remotest degree that the testimony of any man, however distinguished, can add the weight of a single feather to the abounding evidences of the Christian faith, or grave it a line deeper on the heart of a true believer; but it may close the lips of the ribald, it may repress the vanity of her who, forgetting what Christianity has done for woman, aims her feeble shafts against its humblest professor, to know that such a man as Tazewell, whose whole life was spent in the science of proofs and probabilities, must henceforth be ranked with Milton and Newton—­the prince of song and the prince of philosophy, and with our own Pendleton and Wythe—­those serene and undying lights of the law—­among the stedfast believers in the truth of the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments.[11]

It has been said that Tazewell had no ambition.  In one sense he was the most ambitious man of our times; but his ambition was out of the ordinary range.  To retain a seat in a deliberative assembly, and endure the routine of daily sessions for months at a time; to take upon himself a regular foreign mission, or even to accept the presidency itself, would, I firmly believe, have been most grating to his feelings.  Of all but the last we may speak with certainty.  But if some difficult proposition was forced upon the public mind; if some extraordinary emergency had presented itself; if he had been called upon to encounter a national question of the first magnitude, from which others would have shrunk, and which was susceptible of a definitive adjustment in a given time, I believe he would have accepted the mission at once.  Had Mr. Madison, on his election to the presidency, called him to the State Department with a carte blanche as to the terms and mode of settling the vexed questions which grew out of the Berlin and Milan decrees and the British orders in council, I do not say that he would have accepted a seat in the cabinet of a statesman whose election to the presidency he had opposed,—­for I believe he would not; but, if he had accepted it, it is probable those questions which were afterwards discussed by Mr. Webster and Lord Ashburton, and which were settled by the treaty of Washington, would then have received a satisfactory solution.  It was this aspect of Tazewell’s character which called from Randolph the saying in his letter to Gen. Mercer, that, if such a conjuncture in our affairs were to arise as would call into full play the faculties of Tazewell, he would be the first man of the nineteenth century.