It has been said by some from whom better things might have been expected, that Tazewell did not spend his latter years in a manner altogether worthy of his great talents.  To me it appears that such a sentiment has been expressed without due reflection on all the facts of the case, and that the retirement of such a man, under all the circumstances, presents to the contemplative observer one of the grandest moral spectacles of the age.  We have seen that he retired from the active employment of the bar in his 45th or 46th year, merely following up afterwards to the appellate courts some important cases which he had discussed in the lower.  At that time he stood almost without a rival in his profession in Virginia, and, after the death of Pinkney, in the Supreme Court of the United States; and he might have received as large an annual income as was ever derived from the practice of the law in this country; and if he had devoted his time and talents to his profession for twenty years thereafter—­which he might have done, and yet been younger on leaving off than Webster was when that eminent lawyer pleaded the great India-rubber case at Trenton, and would still have had sixteen or eighteen years to spare for repose in old age,—­he would have accumulated the most colossal fortune which has ever been made by forensic exertions at the American or the English bar.  Now this very aspect of the life of Mr. Tazewell strikes me, and I feel assured will appear to posterity, as the most imposing, the most eloquent, and the most sublime picture in his various career.  When he retired he was not wealthy, according to our present standard of wealth, and he had several children born to him after his retirement; yet, with enormous wealth within his grasp, and a moderate competency only in hand, he withdrew from the field of his fame to the bosom of his family, thenceforth to draw his living from the moderate profits of agriculture.  I have said that Mr. Tazewell’s character was formed in the mould of our early statesmen; and of all those statesmen there was not one who did not delight in agriculture as the crowning pleasure and pursuit of life, and more especially as its shadows were falling low.  It was this spirit which impelled Washington, amid all the magnificence of office when office was held by such a man, to sigh for the shades of Mount Vernon, and to prefer the simple employments of the farm, where he might behold, in the words of the “judicious Hooker,” “God’s blessing spring out of our mother earth,” above the glory of arms, and the fleeting shadows and shabby splendors of public office.