He was passing from Toy and King's corner to Hall's. The
waves of recent debate were sweltering in his breast. His person was
erect; his gait was rapid; with one hand he held his cloak in a graceful
fold, and with the other he grasped his ivory curule staff. I thought of
Cicero hastening up the Capitoline hill to announce in the forum the
death of Catiline on the Picenian plain and the slaughter of the
traitor's band.
There were, however, some differences between them, which, or some of
which, observable at first, grew more distinct in the lapse of years, in
their places of nativity, in their temperaments, in their intellectual
traits, and in their politics. Both were partly of Gallic descent; but
here they differed as in other things. Tazewell was French on the
father's side; Taylor on the mother's. Tazewell's ancestors were from
that city on the banks of the Seine in which the piratical Northmen had
dwelt, which they had made the capital of a warlike empire extorted from
one of the drivelling descendants of Charlemagne, and which they had
called by the defiant title of Normandy.
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