never would speak if I could possibly avoid it; and when I could not, repeated, without gesture, the shortest piece that I had committed to memory. I remem ber some verses from Pope, and the first anonymous letter from Newberg, made up the sum and substance of my spoutings, and I can yet repeat much of the first epistle (to Lord Chatham) of the former, and a good deal of the latter. I was then as conscious of my superiority over my competitors in delivery and elocution, as I am now that they are sunk in oblivion; and I despised the award and the umpires in the bottom of my heart. I believe that there is nowhere such foul play as among professors and schoolmasters, more especially if they are priests. I have had a contempt for college honours ever since.' Vol. i, p. 23.

This is highly characteristic. Mouthers and ranters are very apt to bear away the prize: yet it is not very wonderful if professors, even when they are priests, are unable to discern latent superiority in those who mount the rostra only when they cannot help it; and when there, repeat the shortest pieces, monotonously, and without gesture.

The sudden and untimely death of his elder brother, Richard, one of the most promising men in Virginia, appears to have affected him even more deeply than that of his mother. It was a blow from which he never recovered. In the language of Mr. Garland :

“His extreme sensibility had been deeply touched, the quick irritability of his temper exasperated by the tragic events of his family. A father's face he had never seen, save what his lively imagination would picture to itself from the lines of a miniature likeness which he always wore in his bosom. The fond caresses of a tender mother, who alone knew him, were torn from him in his childhood. The second brother had died in his youth; and now the oldest, the best, the pride and hope of the family, after years of suffering and persecution, just as he had triumphed over calumny and oppression, was suddenly called away. We may well imagine how deep, how poignant was his grief, when, thirty years thereafter, in the solitude of his hermitage at Roanoke, his lively fancy brought back those early scenes with all the freshness of recent events, and caused him to exclaim with the Indian chief, who had been deprived of all his children by the white man's hand-Not a drop of Logan's blood-father's blood except St. George, the most bereaved and pitiable of the step-sons of nature!"—Vol. i, pp. 69, 70.

Thereafter Mr. Randolph, now at the head of a large household, became more and more repulsive in his temper. Restless and unhappy, with all the appliances of wealth about him, his morbid spirit appears to have taken its only solace from gloomy meditations upon his own wretchedness. He had no friends, and wanted none; and, as to looking to a higher source for grace and consolation, the idea appears not, as yet, to have entered his imagination. He had been crossed in love, too. His heart had been offered up, he says, with a devotion that knew no reserve." “One I loved better than my own soul, or Him that created it ;" and his biographer seems to think these things an all-sufficient reason for his hero's querulous misan

thropy, and for the "melancholy gloom of fanciful despair," wherein he wrapped himself. Adverting to the effects produced by the death of his brother Richard, Mr. Garland says:

“He had no confidential friend; nor would any tie, however sacred, excuse inquiry. Why should it? for who can minister to a mind diseased, or pluck from the heart its deep-rooted sorrow ?"—Vol. i, p. 70.

. That question was well enough in the lips of Macbeth, where the poet placed it, but rather too poetical for the sober page of a biographer in a Christian land. Our author is still more magniloquent, and runs into bombast, if not something worse, when speaking of his hero's youthful love-scrape, and the girl who jilted him :

"Here, reader, we let drop the curtain. Its thick folds of half a century are impervious to the light of mortal eyes; ask not a look beyond the mysterious veil. There are secrets we trust not to a friend, that we betray not to ourselves, and which none but the impious curiosity of a heartless world would ever dare to penetrate. Let the gross impulses, the base considerations of worldly gain, that constitute the ground and the motive of most human associations, suffice as fit subjects for your cold observation, your ridicule and contempt; but hold sacred, or look with awe on, that deep self-sacrificing passion, which, springing from the soul of man, is all-embracing in its love, fathomless, infinite, and divine! Enough to know, that in the bosom of this man there glowed the fires of such a love, that continued to burn through life, and were only extinguished amid the crumbling ruins of the altar by the damp dews that gathered over them in the dark valley and the shadow of death.”—Vol. i, p. 184.

Mr. Randolph made his first appearance as a public speaker at the Charlotte court, Va., in March, 1799. He was then a candidate to represent that district in Congress. The celebrated Patrick Henry preceded him in the last great effort he ever made. An outline of his speech is given in Wirt's life of that eminent orator. It was truly a master-piece of eloquence, and at its close his hearers were bathed in tears, so vividly had he pictured the evils of disunion; for even then the cry of State rights had led many of the leading minds of Virginia to the very verge of nullification and secession. Randolph, then unknown to fame, a beardless stripling, rose to reply. Mr. Garland describes his appearance on the occasion, and spreads out what the reader cannot help supposing will be an intellectual feast. It is John Randolph's maiden speech. The time, the occasion, the subject-all conspire to whet the reader's eagerness. Page after page is perused. It hardly meets expectation, and appears, despite its stilted phraseology, to grow flatter and more commonplace as he proceeds. Perhaps the reporters of that day were not skilled in their vocation. Even this fails to account for the drowsiness which steals upon the reader, and he is perplexed in the extreme to account for the effects said to have been produced upon FOURTH SERIES, VOL. III.-39

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618

John Randolph.

[October,

the vast multitude by the youthful antagonist of the veteran Henry.
But the peroration, where the orator parodies the Shakspearian
speech of Brutus on the death of Cæsar, is now reached; and at its
close, the mystery is explained, and the reputation of Randolph vin-
dicated, by the following decidedly cool statement:-

"We do not pretend, reader, to give you the language of John Randolph on
this occasion; nor are we certain even that the thoughts are his. We have
nothing but the faint tradition of near fifty years to go upon; and happy are
we if all our researches have enabled us to make even a tolerable approxima
tion to what was said."-Vol. i, p. 141.

In all fairness, a paragraph like this ought to have preceded, rather than followed, this invention. We are clearly of the opinion that if our author's happiness depends, as he intimates, upon the “if” in the last-quoted sentence, he has no right to be happy. There are, fortunately, numerous genuine specimens of Randolph's forensic efforts in the volumes before us; and in the first Congress, under the administration of Mr. Jefferson, he had already reached the high position of a leader in the debates. As chairman of the Committee of Ways and Means-in some respects the most important position in the House he was brought into daily communication with the executive departments. He was remarkable for his untiring industry, and unremitting in his devotion to his public duties. In all his public career, mixed up as it is with many strange idiosyncrasies, there is ever apparent an unyielding adherence to what he thought the right. He hated, indeed, what he called federalism, with an intense bitterness; but he was never known to abandon principle for policy. He was equally unsparing in his denunciations of what he deemed wrong in his own party, and very soon became obnoxious to his chosen associates. What was called the Yazoo speculation-“ a colossus of turpitude," in the language of Mr. Garland-called forth his most strenuous opposition. Members of Mr. Jefferson's cabinet had a pecuniary interest in the matter, and hence open and avowed hostility against the democratic leader pervaded the democratic ranks. Indeed, a party was soon formed for the purpose of putting down the member from Virginia: and they were successful. We quote from his biographer :

"Times had changed; the country was involved in war, and all its resources were pledged to a successful issue; redoubled efforts must now be made to drive him from the councils of the nation, who had opposed its measures, and foreboded nothing but evil as their consequence. Never was a political canvass conducted with more animation. In Buckingham, Mr. Randolph was threatened with personal violence if he attempted to address the people. Some of the older and more prudent persons advised him to retire, and not appear in public. You know very little of me,' said he, ' or you would not give such advice. He was a man incapable of fear. Soon proclamation was made that

1

Mr. Randolph would address the people. A dense throng gathered around ; he mounted the hustings; on the outskirts there hung a lowering and sullen crowd, that evidently meditated insult or violence on the first opportunity. He commenced: 'I understand that I am to be insulted to-day if I attempt to address the people-that a mob is prepared to lay their rude hands upon me, and drag me from these hustings, for daring to exercise the rights of a freeman.' Then fixing his keen eye on the malcontents, and stretching out and slowly waving his long fore-finger towards them, he continued: "My Bible teaches me that the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom, but that the fear of man is the consummation of folly.' He then turned to the people, and went on with his discourse. No one dared to disturb him-his spell was upon them -like the Ancient Mariner,' he held them with his glittering eye,' and made them listen against their will to the story of their country's wrongs, and to feel that deep wounds had been inflicted in the sides of her constitution by those that now sought his political destruction, if not his life.

"Mr. Randolph made extraordinary exertions during this canvass. He felt that something more than his own success or his own reputation were staked on the issue; and never was he more powerful, more commanding, more overwhelming in his eloquence.

"In his favourite county of Prince Edward, where the people loved him like a brother, he surpassed even himself. A young man, who was a student in a neighbouring college, declares that he stood on his feet for three hours unconscious of the flight of time-that he never heard such burning words fall from the lips of man, and was borne along on the tide of his impassioned eloquence like a feather on the bosom of a cataract. When he had ceased-when his voice was no longer heard, and his form had disappeared in the throng, no one moved the people stood still as though they had been shocked by a stroke of lightning-their fixed eyes and pallid cheeks resembled marble statues, or petrified Roman citizens in the forum of Pompeii or Herculaneum. "But it was all in vain; the overwhelming pressure from without was more than even Charlotte district could withstand; and their favourite son was compelled to retire for a short time, while the storm of war was passing over the land, and to seek repose in the shades of Roanoke."-Vol. i, pp. 310, 311.

On his retirement from the councils of the nation, Mr. Randolph led a life of seclusion and solitude, unchequered-it is his own declaration-by "a single ray of enjoyment." In a letter to a friend, he says:

“I had taken so strong a disgust against public business, conducted as it had been for years past, that I doubt my fitness for the situation from which I have been dismissed. The House of Representatives was as odious to me as ever school-room was to a truant boy. To be under the dominion of such wretches as (with few exceptions) composed the majority, was intolerably irksome to my feelings; and although my present situation is far from enviable, I feel the value of the exchange."

To the same friend, in a letter written a few months afterward, he says:

"My body is wholly worn out, and the intellectual part much shattered. Were I to follow the dictates of prudence, I should convert my estates into money, and move northwardly. I wish I could say something of my future movements. I look forward without hope. Clouds and darkness hang upon my prospects; and should my feeble frame hang together a few years longer, the time may arrive when my best friends, as well as myself, may pray that a close be put to the same."

By the earnest solicitation of his friends, however, he again consented to be a candidate for Congress, and in 1815 was triumphantly re-elected. His success afforded him no pleasure, except as it was a source of gratification to others. He says:

"I cannot force myself to think on the subject of public affairs. I am engrossed by reflections of a very different and far more important nature; and look forward to the future in this world, to say nothing of the next, with anticipations that forbid any idle expression of exultation. On the contrary, my sensations are such as become a dependent creature, whose only hope for salvation rests upon the free grace of Him to whom we must look for peace in this world, as well as in the world to come.'

We are thus introduced to the most interesting portion of Mr. Randolph's life, and gradually the secret of his disquietude and anguish of soul is revealed. He had been a student and an admirer of the more prominent teachers of infidelity. Hume and Hobbes, Bayle, Bolingbroke, Voltaire, and Gibbon, were his especial favourites. He had cultivated sceptical philosophy from what he calls his "vain-glorious boyhood." He had looked upon Christianity as cant, and deemed its professors hypocrites or fanatics. In his solitude at Roanoke-where, in his own language, he was as much out of the world as if he had been in Kamtschatka or Juan Fernandez-the terrors of hell got hold upon him. The delusions of infidelity melted away, and the expressions found in letters to his intimate friends, show very clearly that the Holy Spirit was striving with him. Thus to his friend Key he says:

Among the causes of uneasiness which have laid hold upon me lately, is a strong anxiety for the welfare of those whom I love, and whom I see walking in darkness. But there is one source of affliction, the last and deepest, which I must reserve till we meet, if I can prevail upon myself to communicate it even then. It was laid open by one of those wonderful coincidences, which men call chance, but which manifest the hand of God. It has lacerated my heart, and taken from it its last hope in this world. Ought I not to bless God for the evil (as it seems in my sight) as well as the good? Is it not the greatest of blessings, if it be made the means of drawing me unto him? Do I know what to ask at his hands? Is he not the judge of what is good for me? If it be his pleasure that I perish, am I not conscious that the sentence is just? Implicitly, then, will I throw myself upon his mercy: 'Not my will, but thine be done;' 'Lord, be merciful to me a sinner; Help, Lord, or I perish.' And now, my friend, if, after these glimpses of the light, I should shut mine eyes and harden my heart, which now is as melted wax; if I should be enticed back to the 'herd,' and lose all recollection of my wounds, how much deeper my guilt than his whose heart has never been touched by the sense of his perishing, undone condition!"-Vol. ii, p. 67.

And again, a little later, to the same friend:

"I think that the state of solitude and dereliction in which I am placed, has not been without some good effect in giving me better views than I have had of the most important of all subjects; and I would not exchange it, comfortless