Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 39.djvu/188

 176 Southern Historical Society Papers.

may be allowed us, the names and virtues of its members as they pass away, and because we hold Custis Lee justly entitled to take high place beside the best and noblest of our "Virginia Worthies"

Owing to his inbred shrinking from publicity of every kind and to his almost impenetrable reserve, which not even the most persistent "interviewer" ever pierced, these few poor remarks will probably constitute the sole memorial of diim, though, of course, his name vv'ill live, in some measure, in the memoirs of his contemporaries, and especially in the intimate domestic letters of his father, in many of wdiich, still unpublished, there is (as some few of us know, wdio have had the privilege of reading them), constant mention of him.

As we salute him with this halting ''Az'c atqne rale," we are sustained by the abiding remembrance that, from "the prime of youth" to "the frosty, yet kindly, winter of his age," he kept inviolate the chastity of a pure and stainless life, and that with "soft invincibility" he remained to the very end "the Master, of his fate, the Captain of his soul."

W. Gordon McCabe.