arms, even his clothes, have all passed beneath the merciless microscope of history.  His biography has been written and rewritten.  His letters have been drawn out from every lurking place, and have been given to the world in masses and in detachments.  His battles have been fought over and over again, and his state papers have undergone an almost verbal examination.  Yet, despite his vast fame and all the labors of the antiquarian and biographer, Washington is still not understood,—­as a man he is unfamiliar to the posterity that reverences his memory.  He has been misrepresented more or less covertly by hostile critics and by candid friends, and has been disguised and hidden away by the mistaken eulogy and erroneous theories of devout admirers.  All that any one now can do, therefore, is to endeavor from this mass of material to depict the very man himself in the various conjunctures of his life, and strive to see what he really was and what he meant then, and what he is and what he means to us and to the world to-day.

In the progress of time Washington has become in the popular imagination largely mythical; for mythical ideas grow up in this nineteenth century, notwithstanding its boasted intelligence, much as they did in the infancy of the race.  The old sentiment of humanity, more ancient and more lasting than any records or monuments, which led men in the dawn of history to worship their ancestors and the founders of states, still endures.  As the centuries have gone by, this sentiment has lost its religious flavor, and has become more and more restricted in its application, but it has never been wholly extinguished.  Let some man arise great above the ordinary bounds of greatness, and the feeling which caused our progenitors to bow down at the shrines of their forefathers and chiefs leads us to invest our modern hero with a mythical character, and picture him in our imagination as a being to whom, a few thousand years ago, altars would have been builded and libations poured out.

Thus we have to-day in our minds a Washington grand, solemn, and impressive.  In this guise he appears as a man of lofty intellect, vast moral force, supremely successful and fortunate, and wholly apart from and above all his fellow-men.  This lonely figure rises up to our imagination with all the imperial splendor of the Livian Augustus, and with about as much warmth and life as that unrivaled statue.  In this vague but quite serious idea there is a great deal of truth, but not the whole truth.  It is the myth of genuine love and veneration springing from the inborn gratitude of man to the founders and chiefs of his race, but it is not by any means the only one of its family.  There is another, equally diffused, of wholly different parentage.  In its inception this second myth is due to the itinerant parson, bookmaker, and bookseller, Mason Weems.  He wrote a brief biography of Washington, of trifling historical value, yet with sufficient literary