Governor Tazewell, and the Hon. John Talliaferro, who remember him well in childhood, speak with admiration of his moral purity, and entire exemption from all vicious habits. His mother early taught him to read, and impressed on his mind the best lessons. She was a member of the Church of England, a faith from which her son never long departed. On her bended knees, with him by her side, she repeated day after day the prayers and collects of that admirable litany, which were never effaced from his tenacious memory. Often through life has he been known, in mental agony, to ejaculate them with an earnestness that called forth tears from all who heard him.

"When I could first remember," says he to a friend, "I slept in the same bed with my widowed mother-each night, before putting me to bed, I repeated on my knees before her the Lord's Prayer and the Apostle's Creed—each morning kneeling in the bed I put up my little hands in prayer in the same form. Years have since passed away; I have been a skeptic, a professed scoffer, glorying in my infidelity, and vain of the ingenuity with which I could defend it. Prayer never crossed my mind, but in scorn. I am now conscious that the lessons above mentioned, taught me by my dear and revered mother, are of more value to me than all that I have learned from my preceptors and compeers. On Sunday I said my catechism, a great part of which at the distance of thirty-five years I can yet repeat."

CHAPTER IV.

FAMILY CIRCLE.

In the autumn of 1778, the family circle at Matoax consisted of Mr. and Mrs. Tucker, and her three sons, Richard, Theodorick, and John Randolph. Richard was in his ninth year, Theodorick was nearly eight, and John was in the sixth year of his age. They were all sprightly and interesting boys; and cheerfulness was once more restored to this happy family. A more amiable and exemplary stepfather than Mr. Tucker could not be found. This trait in his character was proverbial among his acquaintance every where. "I remember to have heard a brother of mine," says the late Daniel Call," who

married a niece of Mrs. Randolph of Curles, and was thus occasionally thrown into circles, where he sometimes met the Matoax family, once say, that 'Mr. Tucker must be the best father-in-law in the world, or his step-children would not be so fond of him.'" Up to this time the boys had never been to school. All of their instruction had been received at the hands of their mother. Mr. Tucker now undertook their education. But it cannot be supposed that he devoted himself to school-keeping with the rigid discipline of a pedagogue. The life of ease and elegance which he is known to have lived, amidst literary pursuits to which he was devoted, and in the society of wealthy and fashionable neighbors, of which he and his accomplished lady were the chief ornament, would not justify such a conclusion. His leisure was given to their instruction; and he at all times took a lively interest in their improvement. In his letters to Colonel Bland, Jr., who was stationed with a regiment at Charlottesville to guard the captured troops of Burgoyne's army, he often mentions them, and always with great solicitude. In one dated Matoax, July 20, 1779, not ten months after his connection with the family, he writes: "What you wrote about Bob (Robert Banister, a cousin, then with his uncle, Colonel Bland) has inspired the boys with the spirit of emulation, which I hope will be productive of some benefit to them. I find he serves as a very good spur to them when they are growing a little negligent. Two of them appear to be blessed with excellent capacities, but I confess I am afraid that the genius of your namesake (Theodorick), though possessed of great quickness and acuteness in many respects, does not lie in the literary line.

* I shall continue to give them all the assistance that leisure will permit."

John was too young and too delicate to be confined. We may imagine also that, with so indulgent a teacher and so amiable a man, having a spice of the devil withal in his own temper, he could not have learnt much. He was not boisterous, nor inclined to the athletic out-door sports of which boys are so fond. He sought amusements within. When any of the boys and girls from the neighborhood came to Matoax, he introduced the play of "Ladies and Gentlemen," in which each one personated some known or imagined character, male or female, and acted as they supposed such persons would under similar circumstances have acted. He was decidedly of a dramatic

turn. And his ardent temper and oriental imagination, precociously developed, invested with an earnestness and a reality all the sports and pastimes of his childhood. But he was not idle.

There was a certain closet to which he stole away and secreted himself whenever he could. It was not redolent-that closet-of cakes or the perfume of sweetmeats, but the odor of books,—of old musty tomes arranged along its shelves. With a mysterious awe,-as if about to commune with mighty spirits and beings of another world, as he really was-would he close the door upon himself, and devour, with "more eagerness than gingerbread," the contents of those old volumes. His mind, young as he was, craved after ethereal food, and there he found the richest repast.

The first book that fell in his way was Voltaire's History of Charles XII. of Sweden. An admirable writer on education has said, that "whatever the young have to read ought to be objective, clear, simple, and precise; ought to be the thing itself, and not roundabout dialogues about the thing." No book could fill this description more completely than the above-mentioned History-full of stirring incidents, with a style of simple narrative as rapid and perspicuous as that master of style could make it. How his young heart must have burned within him as he pursued the eventful career of the bold, reckless and indomitable Charles! Feeling the impulses of a kindred spirit, his sympathy must have been intense for the wild, stout-hearted Scandinavian. The next book he read was the Spectabut only the narrative and dramatic parts as we might suppose. The young mind can only be interested in things, objects, and not in roundabout dialogues about things. He delighted in Humphrey Clinker-Reynard the Fox came next; then Tales of the Genii and Arabian Nights. What a field of delight was opened here-what a world of glory in those old tales of wonder, the genuine poetry for children! The Arabian Nights and Shakspeare were his idols. He had read Goldsmith's Roman History, and an old History of Braddock's War. When not eight years old, he used to sing an old ballad

tor;

of his defeat:

30

"On the sixth day of July, in the year sixty-five,

At two in the morning did our forces arrive;

When the French and the Indians in ambush did lay,

And there was great slaughter of our forces that day."

But the "Thousand and One Tales" and Shakspeare were his idols! All others were in a sense shallow and limited--had bounds that could be measured-but these were fathomless, boundless; opening up to the rapt vision a world of enchantment, ever varying, ever new. He was a poet, a born poet, nascitur non fit. He did not write poetry; but he spoke it, he felt it, he lived it. His whole life was a poem, of the genuine epic sort; sad, mournful, true. "For poetry," says he, "I have had a decided taste from my childhood; this taste I have sedulously cultivated." Let that old closet tell! Only think of the boy who had read the books we have cited, and Don Quixotte, Gil Blas, Quintus Curtius, Plutarch, Pope's Homer, Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver, Tom Jones, Orlando Furioso, and Thomson's Seasons, before he was eleven years of age!

For more than two years the old closet was to that young genius the cave of Aladdin; and those old tomes the magic lamp by whose aid he could summon to his presence the giants and the genii, the dwarfs and the fairies, the Calibans and the Mirandas, and all the wonderful creations of fancy and imagination. With the clear, open sense and loving heart of childhood, he devoured those narrations and tales, which as he grew up became the themes of reflection, the objects of his aptest illustrations, and the sources whence he drew his lessons of profoundest wisdom. What a force of illustration, and even of argument, is found in his beautiful allusions to the marriage of Sinbad the Sailor to the corpse of his wife; the Old Man of the Sea; and the Vision of Alnascar! As to Shakspeare, he was so thoroughly imbued with his spirit, his own genius so akin to the Avon bard, that he thought and spoke as Shakspeare in his station would have thought and spoken.

He lamented in after life his rambling way of reading. But it could not have been otherwise. He belonged to the irritabile genus -was a born poet, and could not brook the restraint or the gin-horse

routine of a grammar school. "I have been all my life," says he, "the creature of impulse, the sport of chance, the victim of my own uncontrolled and uncontrollable sensations; of a poetic temperament. I admire and pity all who possess this temperament." Poor fellow ! What could mother or step-father do with such a thin-skinned, sensitive, impulsive, imaginative boy? With his fits of passion and swooning, what could they do? Nature is her own best guide. Develope

nature according to her own instincts, and the best has been done that the case will admit of. So thought the kind parents of this delicate boy. They put no restraint upon him. Gentleness and tender care followed all his footsteps. He was suffered to roam freely over the hills and by the waterfalls of Appomatox. The quiet sport of angling was his chief source of amusement. When tired, he stole away into the closet, and none took heed of him. In this happy, ever-remembered dream of childhood, two years and a half passed away. Christmas, in the year seventeen hundred and eighty, was destined to be the last Christmas he would ever spend at Matoax as his home-as his home and dwelling-place.

CHAPTER V.

FLIGHT FROM MATOAX.

THE new year seventeen hundred and eighty-one commenced with the invasion of Virginia by the traitor Arnold. He had been intrusted with an expedition to that province, not with the hope of conquest, or with the expectation of achieving any important military enterprise, but solely for the purpose of plunder and devastation. What the proud soldier scorned to do was fit work for the betrayer of his country. The name of Arnold, before it became a by-word of reproach, was a sound of terror, not to armed men, but to defenceless women and children. The fame of his rapine and murder in his native State had preceded his arrival in Virginia. On the 3d of January, it was rumored at Matoax that the enemy were coming up James river, and that they were destined for Petersburg or Richmond. Mrs. Tucker had then been but five days mother to her last child, the present eminent jurist, Judge Henry St. George Tucker, of the University. "The first time I ever saw that gentleman," said John Randolph once in a speech, "we were trying to get out of the way of the British." The enemy that night landed at Hood's, of which being apprised early next morning, and hearing that they had marched as far as Bland's Ordinary, in their