undlessness
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'