of his loftiest eloquence.  For more than a year the newspapers teemed with eulogy and elegy, and both prose and poetry were severely taxed to pay tribute to the memory of the great one who had gone.  The prose was often stilted and the verse was generally bad, but yet through it all, from the polished sentences of the funeral oration to the humble effusions of the obscurest poet’s corner, there ran a strong and genuine feeling, which the highest art could not refine nor the clumsiest expression degrade.

From that time to this, the stream of praise has flowed on, ever deepening and strengthening, both at home and abroad.  Washington alone in history seems to have risen so high in the estimation of men that criticism has shrunk away abashed, and has only been heard whispering in corners or growling hoarsely in the now famous house in Cheyne Row.

There is a world of meaning in all this, could we but rightly interpret it.  It cannot be brushed aside as mere popular superstition, formed of fancies and prejudices, to which intelligent opposition would be useless.  Nothing is in fact more false than the way in which popular opinions are often belittled and made light of.  The opinion of the world, however reached, becomes in the course of years or centuries the nearest approach we can make to final judgment on human things.  Don Quixote may be dumb to one man, and the sonnets of Shakespeare may leave another cold and weary.  But the fault is in the reader.  There is no doubt of the greatness of Cervantes or Shakespeare, for they have stood the test of time, and the voices of generations of men, from which there is no appeal, have declared them to be great.  The lyrics that all the world loves and repeats, the poetry which is often called hackneyed, is on the whole the best poetry.  The pictures and statues that have drawn crowds of admiring gazers for centuries are the best.  The things that are “caviare to the general” often undoubtedly have much merit, but they lack quite as often the warm, generous, and immortal vitality which appeals alike to rich and poor, to the ignorant and to the learned.

So it is with men.  When years after his death the world agrees to call a man great, the verdict must be accepted.  The historian may whiten or blacken, the critic may weigh and dissect, the form of the judgment may be altered, but the central fact remains, and with the man, whom the world in its vague way has pronounced great, history must reckon one way or the other, whether for good or ill.

When we come to such a man as Washington, the case is still stronger.  Men seem to have agreed that here was greatness which no one could question, and character which no one could fail to respect.  Around other leaders of men, even around the greatest of them, sharp controversies have arisen, and they have their partisans dead as they had them living.  Washington had enemies who assailed him, and friends whom he loved, but in death as in life he seems to