This was plausible, but it did not deceive _him_. He knew very well that his offensive language respecting a man whom he really esteemed was wholly devoid of excuse. He had the courage requisite to expiate the offence by standing before Mr. Clay's pistol; but he could not stand before his countrymen and confess that his abominable antithesis was but the spurt of mingled ill-temper and the vanity to shine. Any good tory can fight a duel with a respectable degree of composure; but to own one's self, in the presence of a nation, to have outraged the feelings of a brother-man, from the desire to startle and amuse an audience, requires the kind of valor which tories do not know. "Whig and tory," says Mr. Jefferson, "belong to natural history." But then there is such a thing, we are told, as the regeneration of the natural man; and we believe it, and cling to it as a truth destined one day to be resuscitated and purified from the mean interpretations which have made the very word sickening to the intelligence of Christendom. Mr. Randolph had not achieved the regeneration of his nature. He was a tory still. In the testing hour, the "high-toned Virginia gentleman" carried the day, without a struggle, over the communicant. During the last years of his life, the monotony of his anguish was relieved by an occasional visit to the Old World. It is interesting to note how thoroughly at home he felt himself among the English gentry, and how promptly they recognized him as a man and a brother. He was, as we have remarked, _more_ English than an Englishman; for England does advance, though slowly, from the insular to the universal. Dining at a great house in London, one evening, he dwelt with pathetic eloquence upon the decline of Virginia. Being asked what he thought was the reason of her decay, he startled and pleased the lords and ladies present by attributing it all to the repeal of the law of primogeniture. One of the guests tells us that this was deemed "a strange remark from a _Republican_" and that, before the party broke up, the company had "almost taken him for an aristocrat." It happened sometimes, when he was conversing with English politicians, that it was the American who defended the English system against the attacks of Englishmen; and so full of British prejudice was he, that, in Paris, he protested that a decent dinner could not be bought for money. Westminster Abbey woke all his veneration. He went into it, one morning, just as service was about beginning, and took his place among the worshippers. Those of our readers who have attended the morning service at an English cathedral on a week-day cannot have forgotten the ludicrous smallness of the congregation compared with the imposing array of official assistants. A person who has a little tincture of the Yankee in him may even find himself wondering how it can "pay" the British empire to employ half a dozen reverend clergymen and a dozen