best that both these able men had been removed in early life from the
deteriorating influence of inferior courts, and transferred to a higher
sphere. Had they gone together to New York, and had been compelled to
follow their cases through the highest courts as well as the lowest, or
had confined themselves to appellate tribunals, they would in their
daily efforts have reared a legal reputation coextensive with the Union,
and, perhaps, more durable. It is only necessary to state that Taylor
remained at the bar ten years after the retirement of Tazewell; that he
was then called upon to preside in the courts in which he had reaped his
brilliant fame; that, when a long and honored judicial career seemed to
stretch before him, he was snatched away at the comparatively early age
of sixty; and that Tazewell survived him more than a quarter of a
century.[4]

Before we leave the Court-room of 1802, glancing, as we pass, at the
face of young Maxwell, then just returned from Yale, who four years
later was to make a name for himself, and of Arthur and Richard Henry
Lee, brothers, whose sparkling eloquence ruled the fierce democracy of
the day, and bespoke its ancestral source, and of others who were about
to step on the threshold of professional life, the young man, sitting at
the clerk's table, and intent upon his work, raising now and then his
dark chestnut eyes to the Counsel or to the Court, his jet black hair
curling about his tall forehead, his erect port telling of the military
exercises in which he so much delighted and excelled, seems, in vision,
to rise before me. Born in Henrico, within a stone's throw of the
birthplace of Henry Clay, who was his intimate personal friend and
colleague in the clerk's office under Peter Tinsley,--the county-man and
colleague also of our late esteemed fellow-citizen, Thomas Williamson,
another pupil of Tinsley,--he had performed such faithful service in the
General Court, that at the age of twenty-four, he was chosen, in May of