The conduct of Mr. Tazewell in respect of public office has also been misunderstood. He would hold no office in perpetuity, and I have already shown that, whenever called upon to render public service, he obeyed the call without a thought of the pecuniary sacrifices which he inevitably must incur;[12] and it would be easy, if it were proper, to show that Mr. Tazewell, though in retirement, afforded most valuable assistance to those who held office, and indeed to all who chose to consult him. He held it as a settled maxim, that it was the first duty of every citizen to serve his country; and I have no doubt that, if the office of Chief Justice of the United States had become vacant during the first fifteen or twenty years after his retirement from the bar, and he had been called to fill it, as perhaps he would have been, he would have accepted the appointment; and I further believe that if the presidency of the Court of Appeals had been tendered him, or even the judgeship of the Superior Court on the Eastern Shore, provided in this last case he did not interfere with the expectations of his brethren of that bar, he would have accepted either, and held it for a certain time, and for a certain time only; for he had no respect for perpetuities in great public trusts. They also misjudge him who say that he ought to have composed a great historical work for posterity--a task which Jefferson, Madison, and John Quincy Adams, with every possible motive urging them to its performance, declined to undertake. In this respect, Mr. Tazewell acted with his usual good sense; not that he did not write on particular topics of our history, as, for instance, the difference between the original and recent surveys, a subject which he has illustrated with a skill in mathematics, with a beauty of argumentation, and with a minuteness of historical research wholly unexpected, and altogether admirable; and so with some other topics. But he acted well in not undertaking the history of Virginia. To write that history worthily would require a residence of some years abroad. Of the materials necessary for such a work not a twentieth part exists in Virginia, or in the United States. Such a work, and Mr. Tazewell well knew its scope, could not be performed by him in that retirement to enjoy which he had relinquished wealth and fame. There is another view of a more personal kind. Whether history is of higher dignity than speech, whether a Thucydides or a Demosthenes be the greater intellect, the critics may decide; but one thing is certain, that the faculties and accomplishments required for writing history and for oral disputations are not only not the same, but have rarely been united in a supreme degree in any human being, and certainly not in the literature of the Anglo-Saxon race. To pass over other languages and nations, let us look at our own. One of the greatest minds of this age, and, so far as logical capacity is concerned, perhaps of any age, was