The old figure of trade has, indeed, passed away; and some wharf owners,
some warehouse men, and some others do not reap the profits of old
times, though, by the way, we now have more and better wharves, more and
better warehouses, than they had at that day; and the cause and the
necessity of the change are obvious. The trade of our fathers in 1802
was an unnatural trade. It was a fungus that sprung from the diseased
condition of foreign powers. It was not the result of developed
productive wealth, but the accident of the war between the two greatest
commercial nations of the globe, which gave us the carrying trade. It
was born of other people's troubles, and destined to die when those
troubles were appeased. It may be safely affirmed, that the business of
Norfolk, the natural result of enterprise, progress, and development,
and not the offspring of foreign action, at Mr. Tazewell's death,
exceeded, in a large degree, the business of Norfolk in 1802, puffed up,
as it was, by ephemeral causes, and that the present wealth of our
people immeasurably surpasses the wealth of the past.

Whatever may have been the rate of legal compensation in 1802, some
description of the leading members of the bar of that day is
indispensable to the canvas, of which Mr. Tazewell is the principal
figure. Besides Hyott, who lived in the retired mansion in which our
venerable fellow-citizen, John Southgate, now resides, and whose name
has long been extinct, and Marsh, who studied in the famous law school
of Judge Reeves, at Lichfield, where Calhoun was initiated in the
mysteries of the law, who built that handsome wooden house in the
fields, long since burned down, in which the youth of my day were
flogged through the rudiments of Ruddiman, and whose sons are among the
enterprising merchants and sea-captains of our modern city, was, first
and foremost, General THOMAS MATHEWS. There he stands, with the figure
of Apollo and with the spirit of Mars, clad in the blue and buff of the