younger statesmen who have since risen to eminence, and who, like their elder colleagues, have, I am grieved to think, nearly all passed away, were among the members, and were engaged day after day, for three months and a half, in performing the office which their country had committed to their hands.  The most distinguished men of the Union,—­statesmen whose own names were historical, men of letters, merchants who remembered that the wealth of the counting-room and the wealth of statesmanship were indissolubly bound together, old planters, clever young men from Virginia and from nearly all the southern States, came to behold its meeting, to see its members, and to hear the debates; and, as if to invest the scene with a yet lovelier hue, beauty, brightened by intelligence and glowing with patriotism, shed its softened light over that imposing spectacle.  In that body, in which an ex-president of the United States presided, in which another ex-president was at the head of a committee, in which the chief justice of the United States was at the head of another committee, in which there was no place of honor for judges, governors, ministers to foreign courts, speakers of the House of Representatives, and senators of the United States, above their fellow-members, the eye of the visitor soon singled out Mr. Tazewell.  He was the grandest figure of a man among them all.  His fame was then at the height, and his large stature, his full stern features, lighted by a wide grave blue eye, his solemn gait, all inspiring awe as he leaned in his seat or passed through the hall—­were in fair keeping with that intellectual image of him which had previously existed in the mind of the beholder.

To trace with any minuteness the course of Mr. Tazewell through more than three of the most anxious months of his life would far exceed my present limits, and as I have already treated this topic in a separate work, and have been required to treat it again, I shall simply say here, that Mr. Tazewell made the opening speech in support of a resolution which he offered, and which marked out the course of the campaign which he believed to be best adapted to attain the general end in view.  Had that resolution been adopted, I now believe, as I believed then, that a constitution would have been formed which would have lasted for half a century, and that Tazewell, as a skilful and fearless mediator between the East and West, would have performed the office with glorious success.  But the passions of men raged high; extremes were the order of the day, and each party stood pledged to its favorite scheme.  His first regular effort on the floor of the Convention was in reply to Mr. Monroe, and gave him the opportunity of expounding his theory of interests as the basis of a political system—­a system as beautiful as true.  His speech presented a fair specimen of what the discussions on the basis question ought to have been—­not of the elaborate dissertation which lasted two days,