Discourse of the Life and Character of the Hon. Littleton Waller TazewellGrigsby, Hugh Blair
History
Discourse of the Life and Character of the Hon. Littleton Waller Tazewell
Grigsby, Hugh Blair
Tazewell, Littleton Waller, 1774-1860
was sudden, he was placable and ever prompt to make an atonement. He was
now in his forty-eighth year, and in the full vigor of a temperate
middle life; but he lived to be the father of the bar for almost the
third of a century, and almost to be the father of the town, which in an
honorable sense he was; dying in January, 1833, at the age of
seventy-eight, and laid away by the hands of descendants among
patrimonial graves at Shenstone Green. He was a true patriot. In the
hour of her fiercest trial he stood by the side of Virginia. While so
many men of wealth and influence in the neighboring counties of Princess
Anne and Norfolk, impelled by their fears, present and prospective, of
British power, and living within the range of British guns, faltered in
their faith to the young republic, and took British protection, Nimmo
clung to the standard of his country; and, having been taken prisoner,
was confined on board the Liverpool frigate when she fired the shot
which, striking the south-eastern angle of St. Paul's Church, has left
its mark for posterity. One recollection personal to myself shows this
fine old man in an amiable view. I had received, at the age of
one-and-twenty, an important trust from the people of Norfolk; and Mr.
Nimmo, meeting me in the street the morning after the election, and
taking in his own pure hands both of mine, said: "My young friend,
remember that you owe a double service--service to your God as well as
to your country; and that he who is faithless to the God of his fathers
can never be faithful to his country." And now, when the day of ambition
with me is long past and gone, and when that day of retribution, which,
as it cometh to all, so it shall come to us, is drawing nigh, I may say
that it ever has been my fervent and steadfast prayer to be able to
illustrate in my humble life the precept of my pious friend.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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