They also misjudge him who say that he ought to have composed a great historical work for posterity—­a task which Jefferson, Madison, and John Quincy Adams, with every possible motive urging them to its performance, declined to undertake.  In this respect, Mr. Tazewell acted with his usual good sense; not that he did not write on particular topics of our history, as, for instance, the difference between the original and recent surveys, a subject which he has illustrated with a skill in mathematics, with a beauty of argumentation, and with a minuteness of historical research wholly unexpected, and altogether admirable; and so with some other topics.  But he acted well in not undertaking the history of Virginia.  To write that history worthily would require a residence of some years abroad.  Of the materials necessary for such a work not a twentieth part exists in Virginia, or in the United States.  Such a work, and Mr. Tazewell well knew its scope, could not be performed by him in that retirement to enjoy which he had relinquished wealth and fame.  There is another view of a more personal kind.  Whether history is of higher dignity than speech, whether a Thucydides or a Demosthenes be the greater intellect, the critics may decide; but one thing is certain, that the faculties and accomplishments required for writing history and for oral disputations are not only not the same, but have rarely been united in a supreme degree in any human being, and certainly not in the literature of the Anglo-Saxon race.  To pass over other languages and nations, let us look at our own.  One of the greatest minds of this age, and, so far as logical capacity is concerned, perhaps of any age, was that of Chief Justice Marshall; and yet, from the date of the publication of his Life of Washington, which is a history of the colonies and of the United States, until it was rewritten and revised by him late in life, it hung like a millstone from his neck; and it has required all his subsequent legal fame, his exalted patriotism, and his domestic purity, to keep him above water in this country.  As for England, the work sunk instantly and irrecoverably.

The writing of history, difficult at all times, is more difficult now.  Recent history trenches alike upon the epic and the dramatic, and the narrator must be half a poet and half a player.  It is, therefore, a subject of gratulation that Mr. Tazewell did not undertake a work which, if done at home, would have been badly done, and which, if done at all, must have called into exercise a peculiar class of talents which neither the bar nor the senate tends to develop, but which in their highest efforts alone can ensure success.  I rejoice that the fame of Tazewell is free from such questionable topics.  There he stands, great as a citizen of a free commonwealth, great at the bar, great in the senate, and great in his rich, various, and overflowing talk.