beneath which the tables groaned, and whose massive old Saxon dishes would have made a Frenchman sweat. Every thing is excellent at these lavish feasts; but they have no luxuries save such as are home-grown. They are, however, for all that is substantial and plain, the very summit of good cheer. At Governor Henry's, they never failed to be, besides, seasoned with his conversation, which at table always grew gay and even gamesome. The dinner ended, he betook himself, as already told, to his studies until supper, after which he again gave himself up to enjoyment. In this manner came, with the kindliest and most cheerful approach, the close of his days; upon which there rested not a stain nor (such had been through life his personal benignity) a hostility. Except tyrants and other public enemies, he had lived at peace with man and God, achieving most surprising and illustrious things, and content, save the sight of his liberated country, with little reward beyond that which he bore in his own approving bosom. [Illustration: Old Court House, Va.] FOOTNOTES: [11] The debates in the Virginia Convention on the Federal Constitution, and his forensic argument against the recovery of the forfeited British debts. [12] He is said (_Wirt_, p. 404) to have been offered by Washington the Secretaryship of State and the embassy to Spain. He certainly was, by him, also offered the War Department, and by Mr. Adams the embassy to France. These are known. When the papers of Alexander Hamilton come to be published down to those of 1796, it will be seen that he was then offered, by the heads of the Federal party, through John Marshall, the nomination for the Presidency, as Washington's successor, but declined it. =Madison.= [Illustration: Madison fac-simile of letter] [Illustration: Montpelier, Madison's Residence] MADISON. Science has had, and perhaps will ever have, its fancies; and fancy has often aspired to become science; for between the two--wide apart as they are said to lie--stretches an uncertain domain, which they seem alternately to occupy by incursion, and of which, when thus seized upon, each appears, oddly enough, often to take possession in the rival name of the other. Thus Astronomy, growing visionary, has pretended to trace from the aspects of the heavenly bodies, not merely their laws and motions, but the vicissitudes of human fate; and chemistry has had its poetic visions of an elixir of life and of the philosopher's stone; while, on the other hand, mere imagination has quite as often attempted to erect, out of the airiest things, a philosophic realm of her own, and to deduce into positive sciences the bumps upon the human skull, the freaks of Nature in the conformation of the features, and even the whimsical diversities of people's handwriting. From all these have been set up grave methods of arriving at a knowledge of men's faculties and characters.