Perhaps the best offhand description of Washington in these later days is that given by an English actor, Bernard, who happened to be driving near Mount Vernon when a carriage containing a man and a woman was upset.  Bernard dismounted to give help, and presently another rider came up and joined in the work.  “He was a tall, erect, well-made man, evidently advanced in years, but who appeared to have retained all the vigor and elasticity resulting from a life of temperance and exercise.  His dress was a blue coat buttoned to the chin, and buckskin breeches."[1] They righted the chaise, harnessed the horse, and revived the young woman who, true to her time and place, had fainted.  Then she and her companion drove off towards Alexandria.  Washington invited Bernard to come home with him and rest during the heat of the day.  The actor consented.  From what the actor subsequently wrote about that chance meeting I take the following paragraphs, some of which strike to the quick: 

[Footnote 1:  Lodge, II, 277.]

In conversation his face had not much variety of expression.  A look of thoughtfulness was given by the compression of the mouth and the indentations of the brow (suggesting an habitual conflict with, and mastery over, passion), which did not seem so much to disdain a sympathy with trivialities as to be incapable of denoting them.  Nor had his voice, so far as I could discover in our quiet talk, much change or richness of intonation, but he always spoke with earnestness, and his eyes (glorious conductors of the light within) burned with a steady fire which no one could mistake for mere affability; they were one grand expression of the well-known line:  “I am a man, and interested in all that concerns humanity.”  In one hour and a half’s conversation he touched on every topic that I brought before him with an even current of good sense, if he embellished it with little wit or verbal elegance.  He spoke like a man who had felt as much as he had reflected, more than he had spoken; like one who had looked upon society rather in the mass than in detail, and who regarded the happiness of America but as the first link in a series of universal victories; for his full faith in the power of those results of civil liberty which he saw all around him led him to foresee that it would erelong, prevail in other countries and that the social millennium of Europe would usher in the political.  When I mentioned to him the difference I perceived between the inhabitants of New England and of the Southern States, he remarked:  “I esteem those people greatly, they are the stamina of the Union and its greatest benefactors.  They are continually spreading themselves too, to settle and enlighten less favored quarters.  Dr. Franklin is a New Englander.”  When I remarked that his observations were flattering to my country, he replied, with great good humor, “Yes, yes, Mr. Bernard, but I consider your country the cradle of free principles, not their armchair.  Liberty