His person may be a little above the ordinary height, well-proportioned, and having the appearance of great capacity to endure fatigue.  His complexion is swarthy, his muscles relaxed as from intense thought long continued.  His features are all finely developed.  His eyes are large, full, and of a dark blue color, shaded by thick black brows a little raised, as if looking on a vast expanse of distant prospect.  A manner firm, manly, dignified, and free. Vox permanens verum subrauca; its tremulous and occasionally interrupted accents give unusual tenderness to its tones.  But it is neither the Ciceronian person, nor the Chatham face, nor the voice of Antony, that we are to admire in Mr. Tazewell.  It is the great and clear comprehension; the freshness and rapidity with which every thing luxuriates on the generous soil of his mind, which is further removed from even occasional sterility than in any one I have known.  This soil has no succession of seasons; the sun which warms it is never for a moment obscured by cloud or eclipse; there reigns a bright, a genial, a perpetual summer.  His perceptions are as intuitive and as strong as those of Judge Marshall.  He has as much intrepidity of intellect as Mr. Pinkney, and great boldness; but no insolence, no exultation of manner.  He wants only ambition to make him rival, nay, perhaps even to surpass the accomplished champion of the federal bar.  His fault is subtlety, and a provoking minuteness of detail in his argument.  He sometimes shows legal and rhetorical artifice where there is not the least occasion for either.  These defects, however, have been acquired in the long habit of addressing subordinate tribunals, where his genius riots in its strength, and are so little connected with the original organization of his mind as to be easily cured.

“There is something absolutely painful in reflecting on the destiny of this extraordinary man.  Endowed with the best and most various gifts I ever knew concur in any individual; possessing a vast fund of information, and indefatigable in whatever he undertakes; he has a thousand times exhibited talents equal to any occasion, and is still unknown to the world, and, until lately, was almost unheard of beyond the limits of his native State.  One may easily reconcile to his philanthropy that “some mute, inglorious Milton” may rest in every neglected grove, because it requires a strong effort of imagination to suppose the clod of the valley ever to have been “pregnant with celestial fire;” but we have not this comfort to allay our mortification, when we see talents of the purest and brightest ray, united to the noblest qualities of the human heart, emitting their lustre in broad daylight, and to the public eye, unnoticed or forgotten.  The sentiment which it excites in one is not so much sympathy with the object as regret for the public loss in not appreciating the rarest gifts of Providence to man.  The individual himself seems too elevated to permit a vulgar pity.