jury, and of those spectators who may happen to be in the court-room at
the time, and are soon forgotten. Many heroes, the poet tells us, lived
before Agamemnon, but are forgotten, because they had no poet to record
their praise; and, before the days of the stenographer, the most
brilliant harangues in our inferior courts perished with the breath of
them who uttered, and of those who heard them. Such has been the fate of
Mr. Tazewell. Of all the speeches which he addressed to the courts and
juries of Norfolk, from 1802 to 1821, not a vestige remains; and all
that we know is, that he was employed on one side or other of all the
important cases of that interval; and that he exhibited abilities which
easily placed him at the head of the bar of the Commonwealth, and
attracted the attention of all who, whether in foreign countries or our
own, held any connexion with our city. I shall pass over his criminal
cases altogether, though they abound in striking passages; and of his
civil cases in the courts of the State during his practice, I shall
select two only, and rather by way of allusion than in full detail, one
of which was tried at the beginning of this period, and the other in
1821 near its close.

About the year 1798, an eccentric individual named John Taylor, but
better known as Solomon John, to distinguish him from two other persons
of the same name living in Norfolk at the same time, a man of wealth and
position, but believed to be slightly deranged in some respects, was
returning from a hunting excursion, and, stopping at Burk's Gardens,
which have long since given way to the houses now composing Hartshorne's
Court, deliberately discharged his piece, which was loaded with small
shot, at a crowd of people, and wounded a man named Rainbow in the leg,
which was at length amputated. Rainbow instituted a suit, an action of
trespass on the case, in the Borough Court, and filed a declaration in
that form. Tazewell, as Taylor's attorney, offered to demur to the