When, to all these engaging traits of character, we add that his charitable benefactions were as large as his mind, and as unostentatious as his life; and that in his dealings he was so scrupulously just, as always to prefer his own loss to the possibility of his wronging another; it can be no wonder, that despite the unpopularity of his federo-political opinions, he was the most beloved and esteemed of all men in Virginia. The influence of Judge Marshall upon the decisions of the Supreme Court, in cases requiring a determination of the limits set by the Constitution to federal power, will be deemed salutary or pernicious, according as the mind which contemplates it is biassed towards the one or the other school of opinions on that subject--towards the _strict_, or towards the _liberal_ (what its opponents term the _licentious_) construction. Having been profoundly--perhaps exaggeratedly--impressed with a dread of the evils attending a feeble government for the Union, he had advocated the new Constitution originally, and maintained the _liberal_ interpretation of it afterwards, as indispensable to the integrity and wholesome action of our system. Opinions which he had thus held for thirteen years, and which had become fixed more and more deeply in his mind by his numberless able vindications of them, he could not be expected to throw aside when he ascended the Bench. They pervaded his decisions there; and such was the influence of his gigantic intellect, that, although, as Chief Justice, his vote had no more legal authority than that of any other Judge, and although most of his associates were deemed, at their appointments, maintainers of the _strict construction_,--the Supreme Court took its tone from him; and in almost every instance where the controversy turned upon the boundaries between _federal_ and _state_ authority, as fixed by the Constitution, its determination tended to enlarge the former, and to circumscribe the latter. Never, probably, did any judge, who had six associates equal to himself in judicial authority, so effectually stamp their adjudications with the impress of his own mind. This may be read, in the generous pleasure with which the best and ablest[22] of those associates dwells upon the {190} inestimable service done to the country, in establishing a code of Constitutional Law so perfect, that "His proudest epitaph may be written in a single line--Here lies the Expounder of the Constitution of the United States." It may be read in the glowing page, where Mr. Binney, resolving the glory of the Court in having "explained, defended and enforced the Constitution," into the merits of its presiding judge, declares himself "lost in admiration of the man, and in gratitude to Heaven for his beneficent life." It may be read in the many volumes of Reports, where, whensoever a question of constitutional law was to be determined, the