To form a just opinion of Mr. Tazewell in private life, he must have been seen again and again. In matters of business he was scrupulously exact himself, and would be satisfied with nothing less from others. In this way he may have given offence, and subjected himself to the charge of closeness; but it was partly the result of his legal habits, and partly of the rigid system which pervaded his financial schemes. That the love of accumulation was no element in the case was shown, apart from the great lesson which his life will read to all, by his large deposits in the vaults of the banks, by which, in the course of thirty years, he must have lost thousands; and by the proverbial moderation of his fees.[13] Such was his care and judgment that I do not think he ever made a bad investment, or lost a sum of money. Withal I am inclined to wish that he had devoted the first ten years of his retirement to a work on the Laws of Nations, and especially of the Law of Admiralty, which was the favorite science of his venerable grandfather, and of which, during the preceding twenty years, he had obtained so perfect a mastery. He loved the Common Law, revelled in its subtleties, expounded with a richness and a grace ever to be remembered the leading statutes by which the wisdom of a thousand years had controlled or modified it, and gloried in it as the living remembrancer of the liberties of his ancestral land. But he regarded the law of admiralty with peculiar and almost hereditary affection. It suited the caste of his intellect. No ordinary horizon bounded its sphere. It overlooked the limits of any single realm, however proud that realm might seem. It was the queen of the sea, whose influence, cast far and wide over the raging billows, breathed peace and safety to the humblest sailor who trod a deck, and upheld with all the strength of civilized man the flag of the feeblest power. Amid the changing revolutions of the human will, amid the fall of empires and the ruin of dynasties, it alone was immutable. It was the tie of nations, which bound men in one universal brotherhood, and gathered peoples about a common altar. No private rule, no immemorial custom, no formal statute, controlled its operations; but right reason in all its supremacy enacted its provisions, and justice, with an even hand, in every dominion and on every sea under heaven, was its pure and equal administrator. Tazewell was fond of repeating that eloquent and exact definition of the general law, which Lord Mansfield, plucking it from the fragments of Cicero's work on the Republic, has made the household thought of our common nature: _Non erit alia lex Romae, alia Athenis, alia nunc, alia posthac, sed et apud omnes gentes et omnia tempora, una eademque lex obtinebit_.[14] Such a science suited the complexion of Tazewell's genius; and in his practice he had framed a large and liberal system of his own. The task would have been a work of love, and would have