found expression was formed on English models, dignified and plentifully garnished with Latin and Greek allusions; the commercial spirit ruled, and the relaxations and amusements partook of its hurry and excitement.  In their gay, hospitable, and mercurial character, the inhabitants were true progenitors of the present metropolis.  A newspaper had been established in 1732, and a theater had existed since 1750.  Although the town had a rural aspect, with its quaint dormer-window houses, its straggling lanes and roads, and the water-pumps in the middle of the streets, it had the aspirations of a city, and already much of the metropolitan air.

These were the surroundings in which the boy’s literary talent was to develop.  His father was a deacon in the Presbyterian church, a sedate, God-fearing man, with the strict severity of the Scotch Covenanter, serious in his intercourse with his family, without sympathy in the amusements of his children; he was not without tenderness in his nature, but the exhibition of it was repressed on principle,—­a man of high character and probity, greatly esteemed by his associates.  He endeavored to bring up his children in sound religious principles, and to leave no room in their lives for triviality.  One of the two weekly half-holidays was required for the catechism, and the only relaxation from the three church services on Sunday was the reading of “Pilgrim’s Progress.”  This cold and severe discipline at home would have been intolerable but for the more lovingly demonstrative and impulsive character of the mother, whose gentle nature and fine intellect won the tender veneration of her children.  Of the father they stood in awe; his conscientious piety failed to waken any religious sensibility in them, and they revolted from a teaching which seemed to regard everything that was pleasant as wicked.  The mother, brought up an Episcopalian, conformed to the religious forms and worship of her husband, but she was never in sympathy with his rigid views.  The children were repelled from the creed of their father, and subsequently all of them except one became attached to the Episcopal Church.  Washington, in order to make sure of his escape, and feel safe while he was still constrained to attend his father’s church, went stealthily to Trinity Church at an early age, and received the rite of confirmation.  The boy was full of vivacity, drollery, and innocent mischief.  His sportiveness and disinclination to religious seriousness gave his mother some anxiety, and she would look at him, says his biographer, with a half-mournful admiration, and exclaim, “O Washington! if you were only good!” He had a love of music, which became later in life a passion, and great fondness for the theater.  The stolen delight of the theater he first tasted in company with a boy who was somewhat his senior, but destined to be his literary comrade,—­James K. Paulding, whose sister was the wife of Irving’s brother William.  Whenever he could afford this indulgence, he stole away early to the theater in John Street, remained until it was time to return to the family prayers at nine, after which he would retire to his room, slip through his window and down the roof to a back alley, and return to enjoy the after-piece.