nation ought to feel an interest, and I sincerely wish it may be encouraged, and that you may receive ample compensation for your labor and expense. The execution is, I think, in many respects praiseworthy. The portraits, an object of considerable interest, are, so far as my acquaintance extends, good likenesses; and the printing is neatly executed with an excellent type. In the characters there is of course some variety. Some of them are drawn with great spirit and justice; some are, perhaps, rather exaggerated. There is much difficulty in giving living characters, at any rate until they shall have withdrawn from the public view." And Mr. Wirt, then Attorney-General, wrote a similar letter November 5, 1818, to Delaplaine.

Marshall was, like Lord Camden and other eminent judges, a great reader of novels. On November 26, 1826, he wrote to Mr. Justice Story that he had just finished reading Miss Austen's novels, and was much pleased with them, saying: "Her flights are not lofty, she does not soar on eagle's wings, but she is pleasing, interesting, equable and yet amusing."

To his latest years he retained his love of country life, and his habits of exercise in the open air. He continued to own the family place in Fauquier county, where he had passed his boyhood, and usually visited it in the summer. And he had another farm three or four miles from Richmond, and often walked out or in.

Mr. Binney, in his sketches of the Old Bar of Philadelphia, incidentally mentions: "After doing my best, one morning, to overtake Chief Justice Marshall in his quick march to the Capitol, when he was nearer to eighty than to seventy, I asked him to what cause in particular he attributed that strong and quick step; and he replied

that he thought it was most due to his commission in the army of the Revolution, in which he had been a regular foot practitioner for nearly six years."

You would not forgive me, were I to omit to mention the Quoit Club, or Barbecue Club, which for many years. used to meet on Saturdays at Buchanan's Spring in a grove on the outskirts of Richmond. The city has spread over the place of meeting, the spring has been walled in and the grove cut down, and the memories of the Club are passing into legend.

According to an account preserved in an article on Chief Justice Marshall in the number for February, 1836, of the Southern Literary Messenger (which I believe has always been considered as faithfully recording the sentiments and the traditions of Virginia), the Quoit Club was coëval with the Constitution of the United States, having been organized in 1788 by thirty gentlemen, of whom Marshall was one; and it grew out of informal fortnightly meetings of some Scotch merchants to play at quoits. Who can doubt that, if those Scotchmen had only introduced their national game of golf, the Chief Justice would have become a master of that game?

There are several picturesque descriptions of the part he took at the meetings of the Quoit Club. It is enough to quote one, perhaps less known than the others, in which the artist, Chester Harding, visiting Richmond during the session of the State convention of 1829-30, when the Chief Justice was nearly seventy-five years old, and the last survivor of the founders of the club, tells us: "I again met Judge Marshall in Richmond, whither I went during the sitting of the convention for amending the constitution. He was a leading member of a quoit club, which I was invited to attend. The bat

tle-ground was about a mile from the city, in a beautiful grove. I went early, with a friend, just as the party were beginning to arrive. I watched for the coming of the old chief. He soon approached with his coat on his arm, and his hat in his hand, which he was using as a fan. He walked directly up to a large bowl of mint-julep, which had been prepared, and drank off a tumbler full of the liquid, smacked his lips, and then turned to the company with a cheerful 'How are you, gentlemen ?' He was looked upon as the best pitcher of the party, and could throw heavier quoits than any other member of the club. The game began with great animation. There were several ties; and, before long, I saw the great Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States down on his knees, measuring the contested distance with a straw, with as much earnestness as if it had been a point of law; and if he proved to be in the right, the woods. would ring with his triumphant shout."

In the summer and autumn of 1831, the Chief Justice had a severe attack of stone, which was cured by lithotomy, performed by the eminent surgeon, Dr. Physick, of Philadelphia, in October, 1831. Another surgeon, who assisted at the operation, tells us that his recovery was in a great degree owing to his extraordinary self-possession, and to the calm and philosophical views which he took of his case, and of the various circumstances attending it. Just before the operation, he wrote to Mr. Justice Story: "I am most earnestly attached to the character of the department, and to the wishes and convenience of those with whom it has been my pride and my happiness to be associated for so many years. I cannot be insensible to the gloom which lowers over us. I have a repugnance to abandoning you under such circumstances,

which is almost invincible. But the solemn convictions of my judgment, sustained by some pride of character, admonish me not to hazard the disgrace of continuing in office a mere inefficient pageant." He concluded by say ing that he had determined to postpone until the next term the question whether he should resign his office. After the operation, he wrote: "Thank Heaven, I have reason to hope that I am relieved. I am, however, under the very disagreeable necessity of taking medicine continually to prevent new formations. I must submit, too, to a severe and most unsociable regimen. Such are the privations of age." He continued to perform the duties of his office, with undiminished powers of mind, for nearly four years more, and ultimately died, in his eightieth year, of a disease of a wholly different character, an enlarged condition of the liver.

There are many testimonies to his great modesty, selfeffacement and true humility, in any company, whether of friends or of strangers. Let me quote but one, recently made known to me by the kindness of the President of your Supreme Court of Appeals (a kinsman of Chief Justice Marshall), and which, with his permission, is given in his own words: "I have an aunt in Fauquier county, Miss Lucy Chilton, now in her ninety-first year. I asked her on one occasion if she had known Judge Marshall. She replied that she had spent weeks at a time in the same house with him. I then asked her what trait or characteristic most impressed her. She replied without hesitation: 'His humility. He seemed to think himself the least considered person in whatever company he chanced to be."" This quality in him may help us to understand the saying, that the great lawgiver and judge of the Hebrews-who, we are told, “was

learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians, and was mighty in words and in deeds" was "very meek, above all men which were upon the face of the earth."

Chief Justice Marshall was a steadfast believer in the truth of Christianity as revealed in the Bible. He was brought up in the Episcopal Church; and Bishop Meade, who knew him well, tells us that he was a constant and reverent worshipper in that church, and contributed liberally to its support, although he never became a communicant. All else that we know of his personal religion is derived from the statements (as handed down by the good bishop) of a daughter of the Chief Justice, who was much with him during the last months of his life. She said that her father told her he never went to bed without concluding his prayer by repeating the Lord's Prayer and the verse beginning, "Now I lay me down to sleep," which his mother had taught him when he was a child; and that the reason why he had never been a communicant was that it was but recently that he had become fully convinced of the divinity of Christ, and he then "determined to apply for admission to the communion of our church objected to commune in private, because he thought it his duty to make a public confession of the Saviour - and, while waiting for improved health to enable him to go to the church for that purpose, he grew worse and died, without ever communing."

His private character cannot be more felicitously or more feelingly summed up than in the resolutions drawn up by Mr. Leigh, and unanimously adopted by the Bar of this Circuit, soon after the death of the Chief Justice: "His private life was worthy of the exalted character he sustained in public station. The unaffected simplicity of his manners; the spotless purity of his morals; his social,