There have been soldiers who have achieved mightier victories in the field, and made conquests more nearly corresponding to the boundlessness of selfish ambition; statesmen who have been connected with more startling upheavals of society:  but it is the greatness of Washington that in public trusts he used power solely for the public good; that he was the life and moderator and stay of the most momentous revolution in human affairs; its moving impulse and its restraining power....

This also is the praise of Washington:  that never in the tide of time has any man lived who had in so great a degree the almost divine faculty to command the confidence of his fellow-men and rule the willing.  Wherever he became known, in his family, his neighborhood, his county, his native State, the continent, the camp, civil life, among the common people, in foreign courts, throughout the civilized world, and even among the savages, he, beyond all other men, had the confidence of his kind.

Copyrighted by D. Appleton and Company, New York.

JOHN AND MICHAEL BANIM

(1798-1846) (1796-1874)

Of the writers who have won esteem by telling the pathetic stories of their country’s people, the names of John and Michael Banim are ranked among the Irish Gael not lower than that of Sir Walter Scott among the British Gael.  The works of the Banim brothers continued the same sad and fascinating story of the “mere Irish” which Maria Edgeworth and Lady Morgan had laid to the hearts of English readers in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century days.  The Banim family was one of those which belonged to the class of “middlemen,” people so designated in Ireland who were neither rich nor poor, but in the fortunate mean.  The family home was in the historic town of Kilkenny, famous alike for its fighting confederation and its fighting cats.  Here Michael was born August 5th, 1796, and John April 3d, 1798.  Michael lived to a green old age, and survived his younger brother John twenty-eight years, less seventeen days; he died at Booterstown, August 30th, 1874.

[Illustration:  John Banim]

The first stories of this brotherly collaboration in letters appeared in 1825 without mark of authorship, as recitals contributed for instruction and amusement about the hearth-stone of an Irish household, called ’The O’Hara Family.’  The minor chords of the soft music of the Gaelic English as it fell from the tongues of Irish lads and lasses, whether in note of sorrow or of sport, had already begun to touch with winsome tenderness the stolid Saxon hearts, when that idyl of their country’s penal days, ‘The Bit o’ Writin’,’ was sent out from the O’Hara fireside.  The almost instantaneous success and popularity of their first stories speedily broke down the anonymity of the Banims, and publishers became eager and gain-giving.  About two dozen stories were published before the death of John, in 1842.  The best-known of them, in addition to the one already mentioned, are ‘The Boyne Water,’ ‘The Croppy,’ and ‘Father Connell.’