Why this change?  If there were such a thing as going apprentice to the art of discovering truth, a master in that art could not set an apprentice a better preliminary lesson than this:  Why did John Randolph go into opposition in 1807?  The gossips of that day had no difficulty in answering the question.  Some said he had asked Mr. Jefferson for a foreign mission, and been refused.  Others thought it was jealousy of Mr. Madison, who was known to be the President’s choice for the succession.  Others surmised that an important state secret had been revealed to other members of the House, but not to him.  These opinions our tyro would find very positively recorded, and he would also, in the course of his researches, come upon the statement that Mr. Randolph himself attributed the breach to his having beaten the President at a game of chess, which the President could not forgive.  The truth is, that John Randolph bolted for the same reason that a steel spring resumes its original bent the instant the restraining force is withdrawn.  His position as leader of a party was irksome, because it obliged him to work in harness, and he had never been broken to harness.  His party connection bound him to side with France in the great contest then raging between France and England, and yet his whole soul sympathized with England.  This native Virginian was more consciously and positively English than any native of England ever was.  English literature had nourished his mind; English names captivated his imagination; English traditions, feelings, instincts, habits, prejudices, were all congenial to his nature.  How hard for such a man to side officially with Napoleon in those gigantic wars!  Abhorring Napoleon with all a Randolph’s force of antipathy, it was nevertheless expected of him, as a good Republican, to interpret leniently the man who, besides being the armed soldier of democracy, had sold Louisiana to the United States.  Randolph, moreover, was an absolute aristocrat.  He delighted to tell the House of Representatives that he, being a Virginian slaveholder, was not obliged to curry favor with his coachman or his shoeblack, lest when he drove to the polls the coachman should dismount from his box, or the shoeblack drop his brushes, and neutralize their master’s vote by voting on the other side.  How he exulted in the fact that in Virginia none but freeholders could vote!  How happy he was to boast, that, in all that Commonwealth, there was no such thing as a ballot-box!  “May I never live to see the day,” he would exclaim, “when a Virginian shall be ashamed to declare aloud at the polls for whom he casts his vote!” What pleasure he took in speaking of his Virginia wilderness as a “barony,” and signing his name “John Randolph of Roanoke,” and in wearing the garments that were worn in Virginia when the great tobacco lords were running through their estates in the fine old picturesque and Irish fashion!