The interest excited in me by what is told in the foregoing was the beginning of my study of Toombs, which never at any time entirely ceased, and which will doubtless continue as long as I live. He has impressed me far more than any other man whom I ever knew. Soon after his return, in 1867, from his exile I resolved I would try to write his Life under the title, "Robert Toombs, as a Lawyer, Statesman, and Talker;" and for ten or fifteen years I had been systematically collecting the data. These had accumulated under each head--especially reports of his epigrams and winged phrases--far more considerably than was my expectation at first. I added to them very largely by copious notes of the record of his congressional life which I read attentively in course, commencing immediately after his death. In a few years I had finished my task. As yet I have not found the times favorable for publication, and the MS. may perplex my literary executor. Of course my object in the too egotistic narrative just made is to inform you that I have bestowed very great labor and study upon the subject, hoping thus to draw your attention. Robert Toombs was born July 2, 1810, on his father's plantation in Wilkes county, Georgia. He went to school at Washington, the county seat; then to the State university; which having left, he finished his collegiate course at Union. Next he spent a year at the law school of Virginia university. He never was a bookworm. His habitual quotations during the last fifteen years of his life--when I was much with him--betrayed a smattering of the Roman authors commonly read at school, a much greater knowledge of the Latin quoted by Blackstone and that of the current law maxims, and considerable familiarity with "Paradise Lost," "Macbeth," and the Falstaff parts of "King Henry IV.," and "Merry Wives," Don Quixote, Burns, and the bible. But this man, whose diction and phrases were the worship of the street and the despair of the cultured, had no deep acquaintance with any literature. Erskine got the staple of his English from a long and fond study of Shakspeare and Milton; but Toombs must have drawn his only from the fountains whence Tom, Dick, Harry, and Mariah get theirs, and then purified and refined it by a secret process that nobody else knew of,--not even himself, as I believe. If he had only corrected after utterance as assiduously as Erskine did, of the two his diction would be much the finer.