sold them not only through the regular channels, but by peddling them himself as he traveled about the country.  In this way he gratified all his propensities, and no doubt derived from life a good deal of simple pleasure.  Chance brought him near Washington in the closing days, and his commercial instinct told him that here was the subject of all others for his pen and his market.  He accordingly produced the biography which had so much success.  Judged solely as literature, the book is beneath contempt.  The style is turgid, overloaded, and at times silly.  The statements are loose, the mode of narration confused and incoherent, and the moralizing is flat and common-place to the last degree.  Yet there was a certain sincerity of feeling underneath all the bombast and platitudes, and this saved the book.  The biography did not go, and was not intended to go, into the hands of the polite society of the great eastern towns.  It was meant for the farmers, the pioneers, and the backwoodsmen of the country.  It went into their homes, and passed with them beyond the Alleghanies and out to the plains and valleys of the great West.  The very defects of the book helped it to success among the simple, hard-working, hard-fighting race engaged in the conquest of the American continent.  To them its heavy and tawdry style, its staring morals, and its real patriotism all seemed eminently befitting the national hero, and thus Weems created the Washington of the popular fancy.  The idea grew up with the country, and became so ingrained in the popular thought that finally everybody was affected by it, and even the most stately and solemn of the Washington biographers adopted the unsupported tales of the itinerant parson and book-peddler.

In regard to the public life of Washington, Weems took the facts known to every one, and drawn for the most part from the gazettes.  He then dressed them up in his own peculiar fashion and gave them to the world.  All this, forming of course nine tenths of his book, has passed, despite its success, into oblivion.  The remaining tenth described Washington’s boyhood until his fourteenth or fifteenth year, and this, which is the work of the author’s imagination, has lived.  Weems, having set himself up as absolutely the only authority as to this period, has been implicitly followed, and has thus come to demand serious consideration.  Until Weems is weighed and disposed of, we cannot even begin an attempt to get at the real Washington.

Weems was not a cold-blooded liar, a mere forger of anecdotes.  He was simply a man destitute of historical sense, training, or morals, ready to take the slenderest fact and work it up for the purposes of the market until it became almost as impossible to reduce it to its original dimensions as it was for the fisherman to get the Afrit back into his jar.  In a word, Weems was an approved myth-maker.  No better example can be given than the way in which he described himself.  It is believed that he preached once, and possibly