ought to be and is--the gift of God. It was a favorite name in England,
and evoked the sweetest measures of the poet Waller; and has ever been,
probably from this circumstance, a family name among the Wallers of
Virginia. A sweet portrait of Dorothea Waller, one of the finest
productions of the elder Peale, always adorned the parlour of her
distinguished son. In less than three years after the birth of
Littleton, she died suddenly, and Mr. Tazewell had no recollection of
his mother. It has often occurred to me that the true secret of the
early retirement of Mr. Tazewell from the bar, might be found in the
shortness of the lives of his progenitors. His grandfather Littleton
died at the age of thirty-three, and his mother at the age of
twenty-three; and when Mr. Tazewell retired from the bar, vigorous as
he was, he was some years older than his father was at the time of his
decease. It is believed that this same conviction was an element in that
love of retirement which was the characteristic of Washington.

In a long, low wooden house, which may still be seen with its roof of
red shingles, at the head of Woodpecker street, on the south side, in
the city of Williamsburg, the residence of Judge Waller, and still owned
by his grandson Dr. Robert Page Waller, and in a small room up stairs,
at the north-east corner, looking on the street, in which his mother was
born before him, on the seventeenth day of December, 1774, Littleton
Waller Tazewell first saw the light. He was a healthy child, and, like
all the children who were born about that time between the waters of the
York and the James, was destined to frequent locomotion to avoid the
marauding parties of the British, who for several years afterwards
infested that region. As his mother died when he was in his third year,
and as his father, who was engaged during the youth of Littleton in the
Conventions, in the House of Delegates, or on the bench, was rarely at
one place for any length of time, he lived, excepting a short interval