lands in Maryland, three islands in Chesapeake Bay, an interest in several trading-vessels, and innumerable indented and other servants.  He became a member of the King’s Council, and lived in great elegance and comfort.  That he was a man of high character, and of notable piety for an age of free living and worldly tendencies, his will shows.  In that document he bequeaths his soul “to that good and gracious God that gave it me, and to my blessed Redeemer, Jesus Christ, assuredly trusting, in and by His meritorious death and passion, to receive salvation.”

The attention of the reader has been particularly called to the character and career of Richard Lee, not only because he was the founder of the family in Virginia, but because the traits of the individual reappear very prominently in the great soldier whose life is the subject of this volume.  The coolness, courage, energy, and aptitude for great affairs, which marked Richard Lee in the seventeenth century, were unmistakably present in the character of Robert E. Lee in the nineteenth century.

We shall conclude our notice of the family by calling attention to that great group of celebrated men who illustrated the name in the days of the Revolution, and exhibited the family characteristics as clearly.  These were Richard Henry Lee, of Chantilly, the famous orator and statesman, who moved in the American Congress the Declaration of Independence; Francis Lightfoot Lee, a scholar of elegant attainments and high literary accomplishments, who signed, with his more renowned brother, the Declaration; William Lee, who became Sheriff of London, and ably seconded the cause of the colonies; and Arthur Lee, diplomatist and representative of America abroad, where he displayed, as his diplomatic correspondence indicates, untiring energy and devotion to the interests of the colonies.  The last of these brothers was Philip Ludwell Lee, whose daughter Matilda married her second cousin, General Henry Lee.  This gentleman, afterward famous as “Light-Horse Harry” Lee, married a second time, and from this union sprung the subject of this memoir.

III.

GENERAL “LIGHT-HORSE HARRY” LEE.

This celebrated soldier, who so largely occupied the public eye in the Revolution, is worthy of notice, both as an eminent member of the Lee family, and as the father of General Robert E. Lee.

He was born in 1756, in the county of Westmoreland—­which boasts of being the birthplace of Washington, Monroe, Richard Henry Lee, General Henry Lee, and General Robert E. Lee, Presidents, statesmen, and soldiers—­and, after graduating at Princeton College, entered the army, in 1776, as captain of cavalry, an arm of the service afterward adopted by his more celebrated descendant, in the United States army.  He soon displayed military ability of high order, and, for the capture of Paulus’s Hook, received a gold medal from Congress.  In 1781 he marched with his “Legion”