He was never out of tune. Call on him when you would, and you found him self-poised and fresh. Argument or narrative followed at your command. This part of his character was very apparent to me during the last seven years of his life. In that interval I called to see him frequently; and, as my own studies lay in the walks of our earlier history, the talk usually ran, for a time at least, on the men and things of an epoch in which the Revolution held the middle place. He seemed to have perfect command of his stores, not by the mere effort of recollection, but of memory and reflection combined, eliminating a truth from the facts which concealed it. A specimen of the talk which actually occurred between us may illustrate my remark. I would approach him and say deliberately in his ear--for within a few years past he had become slightly deaf--"Mr. Tazewell, Col. Richard Bland (who, by the way, died in October, 1776) wrote tracts in the Parson's cause, a tract against the Quakers, and his inquiry into the rights of the colonies; did he write any other pamphlet?" Quick as thought he replied: "Yes, he wrote a tract on the tenure of lands in Virginia, showing that they were allodial and not held in fee. I read the tract when I was a boy; and it helped me in my examination for a license to practise law." He had probably not recalled this fact before for half a century: no copy of the tract is preserved; and there was not another human being then living, I may venture to say, who knew of the existence of such a tract; and so at times with other facts which he recalled after the lapse of seventy years, and which he had learned from his father or from Mr. Wythe. On the other hand, when his earlier recollections were clearly proved to be inaccurate as to matter of fact, as in the case of what he thought had happened at the session of the House of Burgesses of 1765, when Henry's resolutions against the stamp act were passed, and I placed under his eye the discrepancy between his statement of the case and the entry on the journals of the House, he would fight manfully in defence of his own views, but generally ended in cases where the proof was conclusive: "Well, sir, Mr. Wythe told me so." Dates not common or easily reached were fixed in his memory by a kind of connexion with his own life; as for instance, I would ask him whether he remembered the features of Peyton Randolph? And he would answer: "No, sir; I was born in December, 1774, and he died in October, 1775, in Philadelphia, when I was not a year old." And it was by questions such as these, which I could answer with exact precision myself, that I ascertained not only the integrity and worth of his memory, which we all know in aged persons retains with freshness the incidents of youth, but his capacity of combination which, in the degree in which he possessed it, was extremely rare in young or old; and from the nature of my pursuits for the time in question I may