“Charles the XIIth of Sweden. 
  Lewis the XVth, 2 vols. 
  History of the Life and Reign of the Czar Peter the Great. 
  Campaigns of Marshal Turenne. 
  Locke on the Human Understanding. 
  Robertson’s History of America, 2 vols. 
  Robertson’s History of Charles V.
  Voltaire’s Letters. 
  Life of Gustavus Adolphus. 
  Sully’s Memoirs. 
  Goldsmith’s Natural History. 
  Mildman on Trees. 
  Vertot’s Revolution of Rome, 3 vols. 
  Vertot’s Revolution of Portugal, 3 vols. 
  {The Vertot’s if they are in estimation.}

  If there is a good Bookseller’s shop in the City, I would thank
  you for sending me a catalogue of the Books and their prices that
  I may choose such as I want.”

His tastes ran to history and to works treating of war or agriculture, as is indicated both by this list and some earlier ones.  It is not probable that he gave so much attention to lighter literature, although he wrote verses in his youth, and by an occasional allusion in his letters he seems to have been familiar with some of the great works of the imagination, like “Don Quixote."[1]

[Footnote 1:  At his death the appraisers of the estate found 863 volumes in his library, besides a great number of pamphlets, magazines, and maps.  This was a large collection of books for those days, and showed that the possessor, although purely a man of affairs, loved reading and had literary tastes.]

He never freed himself from the self-distrust caused by his profound sense of his own deficiencies in education, on the one hand, and his deep reverence for learning, on the other.  He had fought the Revolution, which opened the way for a new nation, and was at the height of his fame when he wrote to the French officers, who begged him to visit France, that he was “too old to learn French or to talk with ladies;” and it was this feeling in a large measure which kept him from ever being a maker of phrases or a sayer of brilliant things.  In other words, the fact that he was modest and sensitive has been the chief cause of his being thought dull and cold.  This idea, moreover, is wholly that of posterity, for there is not the slightest indication on the part of any contemporary that Washington could not talk well and did not appear to great advantage in society.  It is posterity, looking with natural weariness at endless volumes of official letters with all the angles smoothed off by the editorial plane, that has come to suspect him of being dull in mind and heavy in wit.  His contemporaries knew him to be dignified and often found him stern, but they never for a moment considered him stupid, or thought him a man at whom the shafts of wit could be shot with impunity.  They were fully conscious that he was as able to hold his own in conversation as he was in the cabinet or in the field; and we can easily see the justice of contemporary opinion if we take the trouble to break through the official