youth of one-and-twenty though a married man at that age, and his bride, a sweet face almost perfectly reflected in the features of one of his own daughters, both well executed by the elder Peale, and in good preservation.  There, too, were the portraits of Col.  Nivison and his wife, the parents of Mrs. Tazewell; of Mr. Tazewell himself by Thompson, the most intellectual and lifelike of all his portraits, taken at the age of forty-two; of his wife’s two sisters, who were the beauties and the belles of forty-five years ago, and who have long passed away, and of their brother, the amiable and beloved William Nivison, whose early death was long deplored by our people.  The general library of Mr. Tazewell was kept in a separate building, and consisted of his numerous law books, of the British statutes at large in many thick quartos, and most of the writers of Queen Anne’s time and of the Georges, many in the original quarto, and few or none later than the beginning of the century.  Some of the books had a history of their own.  There was a copy of the Lectures on History, which Dr. Priestley had presented to Judge Tazewell, the father of our subject, in memory of the kindness of the judge to the author when he was flying from the flames of Birmingham.  The beautiful copy of Wilson’s Ornithology with Bonaparte’s continuation, which at the date of its publication was one of the most elegant issues of the American press, had a singular value in the eyes of Mr. Tazewell as the bequest of his friend John Wickham, an extract from the will having been pasted on the fly-leaf of the first volume.

As soon as the visitor fixed his eyes on Mr. Tazewell all else was forgotten.  He was without exception in middle life the most imposing, and in old age the most venerable person I ever beheld.  His height exceeded six feet; and until recently, whether sitting or standing, he was commonly erect, and always when in full flow.  His head and chest were on a large scale, and his vast blue eye, which always seemed to gaze afar, was aptly termed by Wirt an “eye of ocean.”  In early youth he was uncommonly handsome.  In middle life he was very thin though lithe and strong, with a face the outline of which is very like that of Lord Mansfield.  But for the last thirty-five years, the period during which I have been familiar with his person, all those traces of early beauty which had marked his youthful face, and which in middle life may be seen in the portrait of Thompson, had disappeared, and he was altogether on a more developed scale.  His stature had become large, his features were massive, his silver hair fell in ringlets about his neck, and his bearing was grave, and with strangers, until the ice was broken, almost stern; and he appeared with a majesty which filled the most careless spectator with veneration and awe.  And when we add to these the overshadowing reputation universally accorded him, we can readily imagine the solicitude with which the most eminent