Of the play, or rather interlude, of the “Old Soldier” its author, Dunlap, gives an amusing story.  It turned on the home-coming of an old soldier, and, like the topical song of to-day, touched on local affairs: 

“When Wignell, as Darby, recounts what had befallen him in America, in New York, at the adoption of the Federal Constitution, and the inauguration of the president, the interest expressed by the audience in the looks and the changes of countenance of this great man [Washington] became intense.  He smiled at these lines, alluding to the change in the government—­

  There too I saw some mighty pretty shows;
  A revolution, without blood or blows,
  For, as I understood, the cunning elves,
  The people all revolted from themselves.

But at the lines—­

A man who fought to free the land from we,
Like me, had left his farm, a-soldiering to go: 
But having gain’d his point, he had like me,
Return’d his own potato ground to see. 
But there he could not rest.  With one accord
He’s called to be a kind of—­not a lord—­
I don’t know what, he’s not a great man, sure,
For poor men love him just as he were poor. 
They love him like a father or a brother,
DERMOT. 
As we poor Irishmen love one another.

The president looked serious; and when Kathleen asked,

How looked he, Darby?  Was he short or tall?

his countenance showed embarrassment, from the expectation or one of those eulogiums which, he had been obliged to hear on many public occasions, and which must doubtless have been a severe trial to his feelings:  but Darby’s answer that he had not seen him, because he had mistaken a man ’all lace and glitter, botherum and shine,’ for him, until all the show had passed, relieved the hero from apprehension of farther personality, and he indulged in that which was with him extremely rare, a hearty laugh.”

Washington did not even despise amateur performances.  As already mentioned, he expressed a wish to take part in “Cato” himself in 1758, and a year before he had subscribed to the regimental “players at Fort Cumberland,” His diary shows that in 1768 the couple at Mount Vernon “& ye two children were up to Alexandria to see the Inconstant or ’the way to win him’ acted,” which was probably an amateur performance.  Furthermore, Duer tells us that “I was not only frequently admitted to the presence of this most august of men, in propria persona, but once had the honor of appearing before him as one of the dramatis personae in the tragedy of Julius Caesar, enacted by a young ‘American Company,’ (the theatrical corps then performing in New York being called the ‘Old American Company’) in the garret of the Presidential mansion, wherein before the magnates of the land and the elite of the city, I performed the part of Brutus to the Cassius of my old school-fellow, Washington Custis.”