Monroe was his schoolmate. At home, when he was about eighteen years old, he took up Blackstone, a book then lately printed. But he dropped it soon, for difficulties with the mother country were thickening, and Marshall began the military drill.

From 1773, for eight years, he was mainly a soldier, at first learning and teaching the drill, and then for five or six years in active service, as an officer in the Virginia Militia and the Continental Army.

During a lull, for a few months, in the latter part of this period, he studied law and philosophy at William and Mary College; and, in 1780, was admitted to the bar. Beginning practice the next year, for the following sixteen years, before entering the field of national politics, he practiced law, at first in his native county, and then, after his marriage in 1783, at Richmond — a little town in the upland, whither for safety the State archives had been transferred from Williamsburg, and which had now become the capital of the State. From the beginning he was successful. Soon his success was distinguished, and he led the Richmond bar. During this period he was eight times a member of the Assembly; for two years on the Executive Council; and a member of the Virginia Federal Convention in 1788. Once only he argued a case before the Supreme Court in Philadelphia. Although he lost it in 1796, yet his argument made him famous, and he came then to know the leaders in politics. Having declined, in 1795, the office of Attorney-General of the United States, and in 1796 that of Minister to France, both offered him by Washington, he accepted the next year, at the hands of Adams, the position of Envoy-Extraordinary to France, in connection with Charles Cotes

worth Pinckney of South Carolina and Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts.

He returned to the United States in 1798, and new honors poured in upon him fast. Very unwillingly, at the urgent request of Washington, he allowed himself to be a candidate for Congress in that year, and was elected. In the same year, he declined the place of justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, offered him by President Adams. In the spring of 1799, without his own knowledge, he was nominated Secretary of War, and, against his request to withdraw the nomination, it was confirmed. But he did not enter upon this office; for the sudden withdrawal of Timothy Pickering as Secretary of State led to Marshall's appointment as his successor. He accepted that office, and filled it for the remainder of the President's term. And finally, while he had still to serve as Secretary of State for a month or more, on the 31st of January, 1801, he was commissioned Chief Justice of the United States. During the following month, at the President's request, he joined in his own person, strangely enough as it seems to us of the present day, the functions of the head of the judiciary and head of the executive Cabinet. This had happened, however, twelve years before, in the case of John Jay.

Such was the experience, and such the training, that of a soldier, a lawyer and a statesman, with which our great Chief Justice began his new career.

During the thirty-four years and more that were to follow, before Marshall died in office, in his eightieth year, he bore himself with that distinction of intellect, that competent learning, and that strength, dignity, sweetness, and unaffected simplicity of character that all men know, and that made him no less beloved by his

friends than he was honored and admired by all his countrymen.

A strange felicity it was for our country in those early shaping days, when the character of its leaders meant so much, that the career of Washington, as its Chief Executive, should have been followed so soon by that of Marshall in its chief judicial seat. Hardly can two nobler public men be found in the history of mankind than these two Virginians. Yes, Virginians! and we like to think of that to-day as we welcome here our distinguished guest [Mr. Tucker].

Virginia gave us these imperial men,

She gave us these unblemished gentlemen:

What can we give her back but love and praise,

As in the dear, old, unestranged days.

I have now given a short summary of Marshall's life up to the time that he became Chief Justice. It is with great regret that I pass over most of the details of his personal history. A few of them only may be mentioned.

It was on his visit to Virginia, towards the end of 1779, that he met at Yorktown the beautiful little lady, fourteen years old, who became his wife three years later, and who was to be the mother of his ten children,1 and to receive from him the tenderest devotion until the day of her death, in 1831. Some letters of her older sister, Mrs. Carrington, written to another sister, give us a glimpse of Captain Marshall in his twenty-fifth year. These ladies were the daughters of Jaquelin Ambler, Treasurer of the Colony, living next door to the family of Colonel Marshall. Their mother was that Rebecca Burwell for whom, under the name of "Belinda," Jefferson had languished, in his youthful correspondence of 1 Only six of his children grew to full age.

some twenty years before. The girls had the highest expectations when they heard that Captain Marshall was coming home from the war. They were to meet him first at a ball, and were contending for the prize beforehand. Mary, the youngest, carried it off. "At the first introduction," writes her sister, who was but one year older, "he became devoted to her. For my own part," she adds, “I felt not the smallest wish to contest the prize with her.

acter,

She, with a glance, divined his charwhile I, expecting an Adonis, lost all desire of becoming agreeable in his eyes when I beheld his awkward, unpolished manner and total negligence of person. How trivial now seem all such objections," she adds, writing in 1810. "His exemplary tenderness to our unfortunate sister is without parallel." She had early become subject to a nervous affection, that lasted all her life. "But this," it is added, "has only seemed to increase his care and tenderness, and he is, as you know, as entirely devoted as at the moment of their first being married. Always, and under every circumstance an enthusiast in love, I have heard him declare that he looked with astonishment at the present race of lovers, so totally unlike what he had been himself. His never-failing cheerfulness and good humor are a perpetual source of delight to all connected with him, and . . . . have been the means of prolonging the life of her he is so tenderly devoted to."

"He was her devoted lover to the very end of her life," another member of his family has said. And Judge Story, in speaking of him after his wife's death, described him as "the most extraordinary man I ever saw for the depth and tenderness of his feelings."

A little touch of his manner to his wife is seen in a letter written to her from the city of Washington, on Feb