bark and get at the real man who wrote the letters.  In many cases we find that he could employ irony and sarcasm with real force, and his powers of description, even if stilted at times, were vigorous and effective.  All these qualities come out strongly in his letters, if carefully read, and his private correspondence in particular shows a keenness and point which the formalities of public intercourse veiled generally from view.  We are fortunate in having the account of a disinterested and acute observer of the manner in which Washington impressed a casual acquaintance in conversation.  The actor Bernard, whom we have already quoted, and whom we left with Washington at the gates of Mount Vernon, gives us the following vivid picture of what ensued:—­

“In conversation his face had not much variety of expression.  A look of thoughtfulness was given by the compression of the mouth and the indentations of the brow (suggesting an habitual conflict with, and mastery over, passion), which did not seem so much to disdain a sympathy with trivialities as to be incapable of denoting them.  Nor had his voice, so far as I could discover in our quiet talk, much change or richness of intonation, but he always spoke with earnestness, and his eyes (glorious conductors of the light within) burned with a steady fire which no one could mistake for mere affability; they were one grand expression of the well-known line:  ’I am a man, and interested in all that concerns humanity.’  In one hour and a half’s conversation he touched on every topic that I brought before him with an even current of good sense, if he embellished it with little wit or verbal elegance.  He spoke like a man who had felt as much as he had reflected, and reflected more than he had spoken; like one who had looked upon society rather in the mass than in detail, and who regarded the happiness of America but as the first link in a series of universal victories; for his full faith in the power of those results of civil liberty which he saw all around him led him to foresee that it would, erelong, prevail in other countries, and that the social millennium of Europe would usher in the political.  When I mentioned to him the difference I perceived between the inhabitants of New England and of the Southern States, he remarked:  ’I esteem those people greatly; they are the stamina of the Union and its greatest benefactors.  They are continually spreading themselves too, to settle and enlighten less favored quarters.  Dr. Franklin is a New Englander.’  When I remarked that his observations were flattering to my country, he replied, with great good-humor, ’Yes, yes, Mr. Bernard, but I consider your country the cradle of free principles, not their armchair.  Liberty in England is a sort of idol; people are bred up in the belief and love of it, but see little of its doings.  They walk about freely, but then it is between high walls; and the error of its government was in supposing that after a portion of their subjects had crossed