His own more immediate hospitality was of the same kind.  He always entertained in the most liberal manner, both as general and President, and in a style which he thought befitted the station he occupied.  But apart from all this, his table, whether at home or abroad, was never without its guest.  “Dine with us,” he wrote to Lear on July 31, 1797, “or we shall do what we have not done for twenty years, dine alone.”  The real hospitality which opens the door and spreads the board for the friend or stranger, admitting them to the family without form or ceremony, was his also.  “My manner of living is plain,” he wrote to a friend after the Revolution; “I do not mean to be put out of it.  A glass of wine and a bit of mutton are always ready; and such as will be content to partake of them are always welcome.  Those who expect more will be disappointed, but no change will be effected by it.”  Genuine hospitality as unstinted as it was sincere was not characteristic of a cold man, or of one who sought to avoid his fellows.  It is one of the lighter graces of life, perhaps, but when it comes freely and simply, and not as a vehicle for the display or the aggrandizement of its dispenser, it is not without a meaning to the student of character.

Washington was not much given to professions of friendship, nor was he one of the great men who keep a circle of intimates and sometimes of flatterers about them.  He was extremely independent of the world and perfectly self-sufficing, but it is a mistake to suppose that because he unbosomed himself to scarcely any one, and had the loneliness of greatness and of high responsibilities, he was therefore without friends.  He had as many friends as usually fall to the lot of any man; and although he laid bare his inmost heart to none, some were very close and all were very dear to him.  In war and politics, as has already been said, the two men who came nearest to him were Hamilton and Knox, and his diary shows that when he was President he consulted with them nearly every day wholly apart from the regular cabinet meetings.  They were the two advisers who were friends as well as secretaries, and who followed and sustained him as a matter of affection as much as politics.  At home his neighbor, George Mason, although they came to differ, was a strong friend whom he liked and respected, and whose opinion, whether favorable or adverse, he always sought.  His feeling to Patrick Henry was much deeper than mere political or official acquaintance, and the lovable qualities of the brilliant orator, clear even now across the gulf of a century, were evidently strongly felt by Washington.  They differed about the Constitution, but Washington was eager at a later day to have Henry by his side in the cabinet, and in the last years they stood shoulder to shoulder in defense of the Union with a personal sympathy deeper than any born of a mere similarity of opinion.  Henry Lee, the son of his old sweetheart, he loved with a tender