The religious life of Randolph is a most curious study.  He experienced in his lifetime four religious changes, or conversions.  His gentle mother, whose name he seldom uttered without’ adding with tender emphasis, “God bless her!” was such a member of the Church of England as gentle ladies used to be before an “Evangelical” party was known in it.  She taught his infant lips to pray; and, being naturally trustful and affectionate, he was not an unapt pupil.  But in the library of the old mansion on the Appomattox, in which he passed his forming years, there was a “wagon-load” of what he terms “French infidelity,” though it appears there were almost as many volumes of Hobbes, Shaftesbury, Collins, Hume, and Gibbon, as there were of Diderot, D’Alembert, Helvetius, and Voltaire.  These works he read in boyhood; and when he came to mingle among men, he found that the opinions of such authors prevailed in the circles which he most frequented.  Just as he, a natural tory, caught some tincture of republicanism from Jefferson and his friends, so he, the natural believer, adopted the fashion of scepticism, which then ruled the leading minds of all lands; and just as he lapsed back into toryism when the spell which drew him away from it had spent its force, so he became, in the decline of his powers, a prey to religious terrors.  For twenty-two years, as we have said, he held aloof from religion, its ministers, and its temples.  The disease that preyed upon him so sharpened his temper, and so perverted his perceptions of character, that, one after another, he alienated all the friends and relations with whom he ought to have lived; and he often found himself, between the sessions of Congress, the sole white tenant of his lonely house at Roanoke,—­the sick and solitary patriarch of a family of three hundred persons.  He sought to alleviate this horrid solitude by adopting and rearing the orphaned sons of old friends; to whom, when he was himself, he was the most affectionate and generous of guardians.  But even they could not very long endure him; for, in His adverse moods, he was incarnate Distrust, and, having conceived a foul suspicion, his genius enabled him to give it such withering expression that it was not in the nature of a young man to pass it by as the utterance of transient madness.  So they too left him, and he was utterly alone in the midst of a crowd of black dependants.  We see from his letters, that, while he saw the impossibility of his associating with his species, he yet longed and pined for their society and love.  Perhaps there never lived a more unhappy person.  Revering women, and formed to find his happiness in domestic life, he was incapable of being a husband; and if this had not been the case, no woman could have lived with him.  Yearning for companionship, but condemned to be alone, his solace was the reflection that, so long as there was no one near him, he was a torment only to himself.  “Often,” he writes in one of his letters,