incursion.  Gentlemen in Williamsburg bore these misfortunes with reasonable fortitude, but Washington raged against the abuses and the inaction, and vowed that nothing but the imminent danger prevented his resignation.  “The supplicating tears of the women,” he wrote, “and moving petitions of the men melt me into such deadly sorrow that I solemnly declare, if I know my own mind, I could offer myself a willing sacrifice to the butchering enemy, provided that would contribute to the people’s ease.”  This is one of the rare flashes of personal feeling which disclose the real man, warm of heart and temper, full of human sympathy, and giving vent to hot indignation in words which still ring clear and strong across the century that has come and gone.

Serious troubles, moreover, were complicated by petty annoyances.  A Maryland captain, at the head of thirty men, undertook to claim rank over the Virginian commander-in-chief because he had held a king’s commission; and Washington was obliged to travel to Boston in order to have the miserable thing set right by Governor Shirley.  This affair settled, he returned to take up again the old disheartening struggle, and his outspoken condemnation of Dinwiddie’s foolish schemes and of the shortcomings of the government began to raise up backbiters and malcontents at Williamsburg.  “My orders,” he said, “are dark, doubtful, and uncertain; to-day approved, to-morrow condemned.  Left to act and proceed at hazard, accountable for the consequences, and blamed without the benefit of defense.”  He determined nevertheless to bear with his trials until the arrival of Lord Loudon, the new commander-in-chief, from whom he expected vigor and improvement.  Unfortunately he was destined to have only fresh disappointment from the new general, for Lord Loudon was merely one more incompetent man added to the existing confusion.  He paid no heed to the South, matters continued to go badly in the North, and Virginia was left helpless.  So Washington toiled on with much discouragement, and the disagreeable attacks upon him increased.  That it should have been so is not surprising, for he wrote to the governor, who now held him in much disfavor, to the speaker, and indeed to every one, with a most galling plainness.  He was only twenty-five, be it remembered, and his high temper was by no means under perfect control.  He was anything but diplomatic at that period of his life, and was far from patient, using language with much sincerity and force, and indulging in a blunt irony of rather a ferocious kind.  When he was accused finally of getting up reports of imaginary dangers, his temper gave way entirely.  He wrote wrathfully to the governor for justice, and added in a letter to his friend, Captain Peachey:  “As to Colonel C.’s gross and infamous reflections on my conduct last spring, it will be needless, I dare say, to observe further at this time than that the liberty which he has been pleased to allow himself in sporting with my character is little else than