How picturesque and interesting!  How satisfactory to the tory mind!  But alas! this system of exhausting the soil in the production of tobacco by the labor of slaves, and sending for all manufactured articles to England, was more ruinous even than it was picturesque.  No middle class could exist, as in England, to supply the waste of aristocratic blood and means; and in three generations, rich and beautiful Virginia, created for empire, was only another Ireland.  But it was a picturesque system, and John Randolph, poet and tory, revelled in the recollection of it.  “Our Egyptian taskmasters,” he would say, meaning the manufacturers of Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, and New England, “only wish to leave us the recollection of past times, and insist upon our purchasing their vile domestic stuffs; but it won’t do:  no wooden nutmegs for old Virginia.”

His own pecuniary history was an illustration of the working of the system.  His father left forty thousand acres of the best land in the world, and several hundred slaves, to his three boys; the greater part of which property, by the early death of the two elder brothers, fell to John.  As the father died when John was but three years old, there was a minority of eighteen years, during which the boy’s portion should have greatly increased.  So far from increasing, an old debt of his father’s—­a London debt, incurred for goods brought to a joyous household in the London Trader—­remained undiminished at his coming of age, and hung about his neck for many years afterward.  Working two large estates, with a force of negroes equivalent to one hundred and eighty full field hands, he could not afford himself the luxury of a trip to Europe until he was fifty years old.  The amount of this debt we do not know, but he says enough about it for us to infer that it was not of very large amount in comparison with his great resources.  One hundred and eighty stalwart negroes working the best land in the world, under a man so keen and vigilant as this last of the noble Randolphs, and yet making scarcely any headway for a quarter of a century!

The blood of this fine breed of men was also running low.  Both the parents of John Randolph and both of his brothers died young, and he himself inherited weakness which early developed into disease.  One of his half-brothers died a madman.  “My whole name and race,” he would say, “lie under a curse.  I feel the curse clinging to me.”  He was a fair, delicate child, more like a girl than a boy, and more inclined, as a child, to the sports of girls than of boys.  His mother, a fond, tender, gentle lady, nourished his softer qualities, powerless to govern him, and probably never attempting it.  Nevertheless, he was no girl; he was a genuine son of the South.  Such was the violence of his passions, that, before he was four years old, he sometimes in a fit of anger fell senseless upon the floor, and was restored only after much effort.  His step-father,