[9] This speech Mr. Tazewell was surprised to learn from the public prints, was regarded as a great effort.  In a letter dated the 3d of February, 1825, a few days after the delivery of the speech, he writes to a friend in Virginia as follows:  “The newspapers and my Virginian friends have done me irreparable mischief in the too lavish encomia they have bestowed upon my speech, as you call it.  Believe me, I was very much in the situation of him who had been talking prose all his life without knowing it.  I had no conception that I had made a speech, and really thought I had merely given a clear and distinct exposition of a matter of public law as familiar to me as the doctrine of dower, and concerning which I had no more doubt.  And it was with infinite astonishment I first saw the strong panegyric heaped upon my argument here.  So true is this, that on the evening after I had concluded it, I wrote to my friend Wickham, telling him if his eye should see anything of it through the newspapers, he would wonder how so much A B C knowledge could be tolerated here, but that I saw it was necessary to state it, and therefore he must not think me so much of a pedant as he might otherwise be disposed to do.  Had the thing been suffered to pass unnoticed, I might have hoped at some time or other to gain some credit for a speech when I saw an occasion offered to make one; and I have vanity enough to believe that I could make a much better almost any day of the week.”  He complains of the bad Latin the papers put in his mouth, and of such expressions as “three twins,” &c., &c.  I grieve to think that so few specimens of Mr. Tazewell’s arguments are to be found in print.  I have heard from him year after year, in conversation, arguments on current or general topics, which, if emblazoned through the press, would make a fair reputation for a speaker, and he all unconscious at the time that he was making any considerable effort.

[10] Ex-President Tyler, who was the third, was unexpectedly prevented from being present:  the Hon. George Loyall and the speaker were the other two.

[11] In a note to a friend, written Christmas day, 1850, he speaks of the Bible as “the good book,” and says, “it has ever been regarded as most precious.”

[12] From letters in my possession, I could quote a dozen instances in which he expresses his readiness to accept any office which the State might confer upon him; but he did not desire any appointment State or Federal; that he would seek none, but that he could not refuse his services to Virginia when she required them.  See extracts in Appendix, No. 4.

[13] One case occurs to me.  The captain of a French ship with a valuable cargo, having been deceived by some intelligence about the raising of the embargo, sailed into the port of Norfolk, and subjected his ship and cargo to forfeiture.  Tazewell got the ship clear; and when he was informed by the consignee of the ship that the captain had left him a fee of a thousand dollars, and required his receipt for that sum, Tazewell would only accept of three hundred dollars.  I may also state that when he retired from the bar, he had several thousand dollars on his books which could have been collected on application to the parties, but, whether from inadvertence or procrastination, or mere indisposition, he let them pass.