But then he was a man of genius, travel, and reading.  We find him, therefore, as we have said, a conscious witness of his Virginia’s decline.  Along with a pride in the Old Dominion that was fanatical, there was in this man’s heart a constant and most agonizing sense of her inferiority to lands less beloved.  By no tongue or pen—­not by Summer’s tongue nor.  Olmstead’s pen—­have more terrible pictures been drawn of Virginia’s lapse into barbarism, than are to be found in John Randolph’s letters.  At a time (1831) when he would not buy a pocket-knife made in New England, nor send a book to be bound north of the Potomac, we find him writing of his native State in these terms:—­

“I passed a night in Farrarville, in an apartment which, in England, would not have been thought fit for my servant; nor on the Continent did he ever occupy so mean a one.  Wherever I stop it is the same:  walls black and filthy; bed and furniture sordid; furniture scanty and mean, generally broken; no mirror; no fire-irons; in short, dirt and discomfort universally prevail; and in most private houses the matter is not mended.  The cows milked a half a mile off, or not got up, and no milk to be had at any distance,—­no jordan;—­in fact, all the old gentry are gone, and the nouveaux riches, when they have the inclination, do not know how to live. Biscuit, not half cuit; everything animal and vegetable smeared with butter and lard.  Poverty stalking through the land, while we are engaged in political metaphysics, and, amidst our filth and vermin, like the Spaniard and Portuguese, look down with contempt on other nations,—­England and France especially.  We hug our lousy cloak around us, take another chaw of tub-backer, float the room with nastiness, or ruin the grate and fire-irons, where they happen not to be rusty, and try conclusions upon constitutional points.”

What truth and painting in this passage!  But if we had asked this suffering genius as to the cause of his “country’s” decline, he would have given us a mad answer indeed.  He would have said, in his wild way, that it was all Tom Jefferson’s doing, sir.  Tom Jefferson abolished primogeniture in Virginia, and thus, as John Randolph believed, destroyed the old families, the life and glory of the.  State.  Tom Jefferson was unfaithful to the States’ Rights and strict-constructionist creed, of which he was the expounder and trustee, and thus let in the “American system” of Henry Clay, with its protective tariff, which completed the ruin of the agricultural States.  This was his simple theory of the situation.  These were the reasons why he despaired of ever again seeing, to use his own language,