NO man of his time filled a larger space in the public eye of this country than John Randolph of Roanoke. His eccentricities, audacity and brilliancy,--his pride of birth and race, fearlessness and self-assertion,--his incisive and trenchant speeches set off with sparkling wit, keen satire, fierce invective, clothed in perfect English, and uttered with the style of a master, his sharp criticisms of the faults and short-comings of his fellow-Congressmen, which gained for him the title, "schoolmaster of Congress," together with his political consistency and fitfulness of temper, invested all his movements and sayings with a peculiar charm for the people. In his earliest years he had been carefully taught by his beautiful mother, the Creed, the Lord's Prayer, the Ten Commandments, and many parts of God's Word, until he had them by heart, and yet, in his haughty youth and early manhood he strove to set at naught these teachings: furnished himself with a "whole body of infidelity," as he styled his collection of the writings of Voltaire and other French authors, as well as British, who strove to abolish the Bible, and for many years it seemed at once his pride and delight to wield the weapons drawn from these arsenals against the truths which make men wise unto Eternal Life, and to jeer with flout and scoff at all he had learned from his mother's lips. But later on he confessed, with heart-breaking sobs and bitter tears, that with all his arrogance and insolence, his stern resolve to become and continue a Deist, he had never been able to put aside for a single day or night the lessons taught him by his mother, and that the hallowed forms of sound words, learned on her lap or at her knee, had dwelt with him, and were ever sounding in his ears, to admonish, counsel and reprove. There have been few more pathetic scenes than that in which Randolph came to die; a gaunt old man, old before his time; worn out by misery, shrivelled and haggard, sitting upright in his bed, covered by a blanket, even his head enveloped and his hat on top of it; unutterable despair looking out at his eyes, his pinched lips and squeaking voice uttering, "Let me see it; get a dictionary; find me the word Remorse." A dictionary could not be found. "Write it; I must see it," he almost shrieked with failing voice. The word was written on his visiting card below his name; he demanded that it should be written above as well. The card was handed to him. "Remorse, John Randolph of Roanoke, Remorse." With horror in his face and that card in his hand, his eyes staring at the word, he breathed his last. From that mournful death-bed seemed to come floating the solemn words, "Take fast hold of instruction; keep her; let her not go, for she is thy life," and "He that sinneth against wisdom wrongeth his own soul."