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
Let us remember ourselves, and inculcate upon our children the lessons
of so august a life. Let us point them to his pure and studious youth,
and his love of those who taught him, weeping at the age of eight in
parting from his young tutor, whom he was to meet again; and later as
his rival and equal at the bar; and later still when both, having
attained the highest honors of the profession, had retired from its
walks; and later still, when half a century had elapsed, he closed a
tender and life-long friendship at his grave. Let us point to him,
unguarded by a parent's care from his third year, that parent one of the
master-spirits of a great Revolution and ever absent in his fearful
work, remarkable for his correct deportment and that perseverance in
well-doing so strikingly shown by the fact that he, alone among his
young contemporaries, finished his studies at college with the
approbation of the faculty, and received the only degree conferred upon
his class. Let us point our youth to the zeal with which he sought
instruction in useful knowledge; how, a mere boy, almost imperceptibly,
it may be in the office of his grandfather, or of Mr. Wythe, or of Mr.
Wickham, or of the General Court, but some how, somewhere, perhaps drawn
on the instant from the philosophy of the law, he acquired a thorough
knowledge of all the mysteries and learning of a clerk of a court--a
mastery so thorough, that in after years he was consulted by the most
eminent clerks in difficult cases in their calling; and how he not only
mastered that department of knowledge, but studied its mere mechanical
details, and learned that beautiful hand which was conspicuous in all
his writings. Let us recall to them the industry with which he, the
heir-apparent of a fortune, which, however, he never received, pursued
the study of the law; how, by his moral purity, his intelligence, and
his becoming deportment, he won, a mere youth, the confidence and the
intimacy of some of the most distinguished men of that age; and how he
heeded the lessons which he heard from their lips, and imitated the
singular virtues which shone in their lives. Let us recall the fact, so
patent in his life, and so cheering to the young and virtuous of every
land, that moral worth and abilities will ever be promptly recognized by
those true patrons of the age--the People--who took the young Tazewell
in charge, who, at the age of one-and-twenty, sent him to the Assembly,
and who, as soon as he was eligible to a seat in the House of
Representatives, conferred upon him that most distinguished honor in
their gift and placed him in the chair of John Marshall. Let us call the
attention of our young men to the next great step in his life, when,
having obtained the highest political honors which could be conferred on
so young a man, realizing that a competent fortune was the solid basis
of independence moral and political, and that the family hearth was the
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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