emergent case occurred, and he was called out by the people, he never declined office, but entered into it at every personal sacrifice, performing its duties with such success and such ability as to leave an impression upon the times in which he lived.[8] He practically defeated the wild banking schemes of the session by the insertion of a specie clause which was readily adopted by the friends of those measures, but which, as was designed, made their schemes impracticable. But his great effort in the assembly of 1816 was his speech on the Convention bill of that year. He spoke in reply to the late Gen. Smythe of Wythe; and in an argument of uncommon power, which formed one of the eloquent traditions of the House when I took my seat in it twelve years later, he answered the objections urged against the existing constitution, and sustained that instrument in all its length and breadth. His speech produced a wonderful effect upon all who heard it. The late Philip Doddridge, one of the ablest and most decided of all Mr. Tazewell's opponents in state and federal politics, but ever abounding in that magnanimity which flourishes most in the finest minds, always spoke of the argument of Mr. Tazewell in reply to Gen. Smythe as extraordinary--as surpassing any that he ever heard in a deliberative assembly. He told me so in conversation, and he afterwards spoke of it in the same exalted strain in the House of Delegates and in the Convention of 1829. The result of the Convention discussion was, that, though a bill calling a Convention passed the House by a small majority, it was lost in the Senate; and a compromise was effected between the East and the West by reorganizing the basis of representation in the Senate on white population according to the census of 1810. In this as on most other occasions the testimony magnifying the speeches of Tazewell come from a hostile quarter.