This description is certainly not a flattering one, and all other accounts as well as the best portraits prove that Washington was a much handsomer man than this letter would indicate.  Yet the writer, despite his freedom from all illusions and his readiness to state frankly all defects, was profoundly impressed by Washington’s appearance as he watched him meditating by the camp-fire at the crisis of the country’s fate, and herein lies the principal interest of his description.

This personal impressiveness, however, affected every one upon all occasions.

Mr. Rush, for instance, saw Washington go on one occasion to open Congress.  He drove to the hall in a handsome carriage of his own, with his servants dressed in white liveries.  When he had alighted he stopped on the step, and pausing faced round to wait for his secretary.  The vast crowd looked at him in dead silence, and then, when he turned away, broke into wild cheering.  At his second inauguration he was dressed in deep mourning for the death of his nephew.  He took the oath of office in the Senate Chamber, and Major Forman, who was present, wrote in his diary:  “Every eye was on him.  When he said, ‘I, George Washington,’ my blood seemed to run cold and every one seemed to start.”  At the inauguration of Adams, another eye-witness wrote that Washington, dressed in black velvet, with a military hat and black cockade, was the central figure in the scene, and when he left the chamber the crowds followed him, cheering and shouting to the door of his own house.

There must have been something very impressive about a man who, with no pretensions to the art of the orator and with no touch of the charlatan, could so move and affect vast bodies of men by his presence alone.  But the people, with the keen eye of affection, looked beyond the mere outward nobility of form.  They saw the soldier who had given them victory, the great statesman who had led them out of confusion and faction to order and good government.  Party newspapers might rave, but the instinct of the people was never at fault.  They loved, trusted and well-nigh worshiped Washington living, and they have honored and reverenced him with an unchanging fidelity since his death, nearly a century ago.

But little more remains to be said.  Washington had his faults, for he was human; but they are not easy to point out, so perfect was his mastery of himself.  He was intensely reserved and very silent, and these are the qualities which gave him the reputation in history of being distant and unsympathetic.  In truth, he had not only warm affections and a generous heart, but there was a strong vein of sentiment in his composition.  At the same time he was in no wise romantic, and the ruling element in his make-up was prose, good solid prose, and not poetry.  He did not have the poetical and imaginative quality so strongly developed in Lincoln.  Yet he was not devoid of imagination, although it was here that he