At the time of becoming a member of that convention, he wrote to Mr. Justice Story an amusingly apologetic letter, dated Richmond, June 11th, 1829, in which he said: "I am almost ashamed of my weakness and irresolution, when I tell you that I am a member of our convention. I was in earnest when I told you that I would not come into that body, and really believed that I should adhere to that determination; but I have acted like a girl addressed by a gentleman she does not positively dislike, but is unwilling to marry. She is sure to yield to the advice and persuasion of her friends." "I assure you I regret being a member, and could I have obeyed the dictates of my own judgment I should not have been one. I am conscious that I cannot perform a part I should wish to take in a popular assembly; but I am like Molière's Médecin Malgré Lui."

Mr. Grigsby tells us that "he spoke but seldom in the convention, and always with deliberation," and that "an intense earnestness was the leading trait of his manner." Some remarks of his on the judicial tenure may fitly be quoted, without comment.

Strenuously upholding, as essential to the independence of the judiciary, the tenure of office during good behavior, he said: "I have grown old in the opinion, that there is nothing more dear to Virginia, or ought to be dearer to her statesmen, and that the best interests of our country are secured by it. Advert, Sir, to the duties of a judge. He has to pass between the government and the man whom that government is prosecuting: between the most powerful individual in the community, and the poorest and most unpopular." "Is it not, to the last degree, important that he should be rendered perfectly and completely independent, with nothing to influence or control him but God and his conscience? You do not allow a man to perform the duties of a juryman or a judge, if he has one dollar of interest in the matter to be decided; and will you allow a judge to give a decision when his

office may depend upon it? When his decision may offend a powerful and influential man?" "And will you make me believe that if the manner of his decision may affect the tenure of that office, the man himself will not be affected by that consideration?" "I have always thought, from my earliest youth till now, that the greatest scourge an angry Heaven ever inflicted upon an ungrateful and a sinning people was an ignorant, a corrupt, or a dependent judiciary."

The question of the weight, as a precedent, of the act of Congress of 1802, abolishing the circuit judgeships created by Congress in 1801, having been discussed by other members of the convention, and Chief Justice Marshall's opinion having been requested, he said, "that it was with great, very great repugnance, that he rose to utter a syllable upon the subject. His reluctance to do so was very great indeed; and he had, throughout the previous debates on this subject, most carefully avoided expressing any opinion whatever upon what had been called a construction of the Constitution of the United States by the act of Congress of 1802. He should now, as far as possible, continue to avoid expressing any opinion on that act of Congress. There was something in his situation, which ought to induce him to avoid doing so. He would go no farther than to say, that he did not conceive the Constitution to have been at all definitively expounded by a' single act of Congress. He should not meddle with the question, whether a course of successive legislation should or should not be held as a final exposition of it; but he would say this—that a single act of Congress, unconnected with any other act by the other departments of the Federal Government, and especially of that department more especially entrusted with the construction of the Constitution in a great degree, when there was no union of departments, but the legislative department alone had acted, and acted but once, even admitting that act not to have passed in times of high political and party excitement, could never be admitted as final and conclusive."

A discussion of the merits of his Life of Washington would be out of place on this occasion. But I may mention having been favored with a sight of his letter of November 25th, 1833, accepting the Presidency of the Washington National Monument Society, in which he said: "You are right in supposing that the most ardent wish of my heart is to see some lasting testimonial of the grateful affection of his country erected to the memory of her first citizen. I have always wished it, and have always thought that the metropolis of the Union was the first place for this national monument."

His letter to Delaplaine, containing the autobiography already quoted, contains another passage too characteristic to be omitted: "I received also a letter from you, requesting some expression of my sentiments respecting your repository, and indicating an intention to publish in some conspicuous manner the certificates which might be given by Mr. Wirt and myself. I have been ever particularly unwilling to obtain this kind of distinction, and must insist on not receiving it now. I have, however, no difficulty in saying, that your work is one in which the 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 5th, 1818, to Delaplaine.

Marshall was, like Lord Camden and other eminent judges, a great reader of novels. On November 26th,

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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 battle-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