a gentleman of splendid form, broad shoulders and extended chest, with a magnificent head which was carried erect, and which might be aptly compared to that of Daniel Webster. His eyes were large and bright, his features straight, finely chiseled, forming a face of Grecian lineaments and expression. I did not then know who he was. The idea formed on my youthful mind was that he must be a great and famous man. I inquired respecting him, and was told that he was Mr. Howe Peyton, the famous lawyer and prosecutor. I had often heard my father speak of Mr. Peyton as one of the great lawyers of Virginia, then having her Johnson, Wickham, Tazewell, Baldwin, Sheffey, Wirt, Leigh, Tucker, Stannard, and other eminent men, who were his contemporaries. I had never seen Mr. Peyton until now. There was something, however, in the noble and dignified appearance and bearing of the man now standing before me, that at once arrested attention and impressed the beholder. The opinion formed by me of his greatness was afterwards, upon a better acquaintance, fully justified. I knew little of Mr. Peyton personally until after I entered the University of Virginia, with his son, John Lewis Peyton, in 1842, both of us members of the law class under the late Henry St. George Tucker. Mr. Peyton, at that time Commonwealth's Attorney for Albemarle, and the other counties composing the circuit of Judge Thompson, when in Charlottesville attending the court, sojourned at the residence of his brother-in-law, John Cochran, Esq., now (1879) surviving in his 86th year. Upon these occasions, at his request, his son and myself spent much time with him. Mr. Peyton manifested a deep interest, naturally, in the progress of his son, and in my own, because of his warm and intimate friendship for my father. It was during the frequent conversations which it pleased him to hold with us, that I learned to appreciate the great powers of his mind, not perhaps as to its capacity, but more especially as to the wonderful faculty he possessed of simplifying and rendering clear the most abstruse subjects. And in this perhaps, as much as in anything else lay the secret of his success as a lawyer. He could take, for instance, the most difficult point of law, and in a few well chosen, pithy sentences, place it clearly and forcibly before the minds of his hearers. As an illustration, I remember, shortly after we had commenced the study of law in the junior department, he made special inquiry as to our progress, examined us upon what we had gone over, and inquired the subject of our next lecture. We replied that it was "Uses and Trusts," frankly confessing that although we had read the text, we still felt ignorant of the subject. He then said, "Listen to me boys;" and went into a dissertation upon the intricate and difficult subject, and in a conversation of perhaps two hours, gave us a history, accurate in chronology, minute in detail, profound and clear, as an exposition of