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
Then take your model of a man who draws his sustenance from the plough,
a private citizen, who lives privately, not because he cannot obtain
office, but because, having won the highest honors, he withdraws from
the scene and leaves the glittering rewards of public service to be
divided among those who seek them. Look for his name in the newspapers,
and you will not find it from year's end to year's end; look for deep
intrigues in local politics, and you will find no finger of his in the
dirty work. Look at the ill success of those who have engaged in public
affairs, their pecuniary entanglements, their deferred hopes, their
sleepless nights, those poisoned fountains of feeling bitter as aloes
even to the eye that looks on them as they bubble; these and such things
you may find, and find easily, but not at the door of Tazewell. He is
strictly a private citizen, engaged in his private affairs, raising and
selling at fair prices in company with his neighbors his oats and corn
and potatoes, and showing to all that the highest faculties are as
practical as the lowest, and that diligence and attention always have
their reward. Without patrimony, with a moderation in taking fees
without an example in our land, living as became a gentleman of his
position in life and affairs, he yet accumulated a larger fortune than
was probably ever before accumulated by a Virginia farmer or a lawyer
beginning life without patrimony; and when wealth was obtained, living
with that modesty and simplicity so becoming to great genius and great
wealth, ever looking with just contempt on that most piteous of all
spectacles, the spectacle of lofty genius debruised and debased by the
accursed thirst for gold; and presenting in all the private relations of
life an example which may be held up for the imitation of the old and
the young. When you have combined these various characters into one
whole, you may form some general notion of what Mr. Tazewell was.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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