His library was a curious medley of books, if those on military science and agriculture are omitted.  There is a fair amount of the standard history of the day, a little theology, so ill assorted as to suggest gifts rather than purchases, a miscellany of contemporary politics, and a very little belles-lettres.  In political science the only works in the slightest degree noticeable are Smith’s “Wealth of Nations,” “The Federalist,” and Rousseau’s “Social Compact,” and, as the latter was in French, it could not have been read.  In lighter literature Homer, Shakespeare, and Burns, Lord Chesterfield, Swift, Smollett, Fielding, and Sterne, and “Don Quixote,” are the only ones deserving notice.  It is worthy of mention that Washington’s favorite quotation was Addison’s “’Tis not in mortals to command success,” but he also utilized with considerable aptitude quotations from Shakespeare and Sterne.  There were half a dozen of the ephemeral novels of the day, but these were probably Mrs. Washington’s, as her name is written in one, and her husband’s in none.  Writing to his grandson, Washington warned him that “light reading (by this, I mean books of little importance) may amuse for the moment, but leaves nothing solid behind.”

[Illustration:  WASHINGTON’S BOOK-PLATE]

One element of Washington’s reading which cannot be passed over without notice is that of newspapers.  In his early life he presumably read the only local paper of the time (the Virginia Gazette), for when an anonymous writer, “Centinel,” in 1756, charged that Washington’s regiment was given over to drunkenness and other misbehavior, he drew up a reply, which he sent with ten shillings to the newspaper, but the printer apparently declined to print it, for it never appeared.

After the Revolution he complained to his Philadelphia agent, “I have such a number of Gazettes, crowded upon me (many without orders) that they are not only expensive, but really useless; as my other avocations will not afford me time to read them oftentimes, and when I do attempt it, find them more troublesome, than profitable; I have therefore to beg, if you Should get Money into your hands on Acct of the Inclosed Certificate, that you would be so good as to pay what I am owing to Messrs Dunlap & Claypoole, Mr. Oswald & Mr. Humphrey’s.  If they consider me however as engaged for the year, I am Content to let the matter run on to the Expiration of it” During the Presidency he subscribed to the Gazette of the United States, Brown’s Gazette, Dunlap’s American Advertiser, the Pennsylvania Gazette, Bache’s Aurora, and the New York Magazine, Carey’s Museum, and the Universal Asylum, though at this time he “lamented that the editors of the different gazettes in the Union do not more generally and more correctly (instead of stuffing their papers with scurrility and nonsensical declamation, which few would read if they were apprised of the contents,) publish the debates in Congress on all great national questions.”