add to the existing knowledge of the facts in Washington's
career would have but little result beyond the multiplication of
printed pages. The antiquarian, the historian, and the critic have
exhausted every source, and the most minute details have been and
still are the subject of endless writing and constant discussion.
Every house he ever lived in has been drawn and painted; every
portrait, and statue, and medal has been catalogued and engraved. His
private affairs, his servants, his horses, his arms, even his clothes,
have all passed beneath the merciless microscope of history. His
biography has been written and rewritten. His letters have been drawn
out from every lurking place, and have been given to the world in
masses and in detachments. His battles have been fought over and
over again, and his state papers have undergone an almost verbal
examination. Yet, despite his vast fame and all the labors of the
antiquarian and biographer, Washington is still not understood,--as a
man he is unfamiliar to the posterity that reverences his memory. He
has been misrepresented more or less covertly by hostile critics and
by candid friends, and has been disguised and hidden away by the
mistaken eulogy and erroneous theories of devout admirers. All that
any one now can do, therefore, is to endeavor from this mass of
material to depict the very man himself in the various conjunctures of
his life, and strive to see what he really was and what he meant then,
and what he is and what he means to us and to the world to-day.

In the progress of time Washington has become in the popular
imagination largely mythical; for mythical ideas grow up in this
nineteenth century, notwithstanding its boasted intelligence, much as
they did in the infancy of the race. The old sentiment of humanity,
more ancient and more lasting than any records or monuments, which led
men in the dawn of history to worship their ancestors and the founders
of states, still endures. As the centuries have gone by, this
sentiment has lost its religious flavor, and has become more and
more restricted in its application, but it has never been wholly
extinguished. Let some man arise great above the ordinary bounds of
greatness, and the feeling which caused our progenitors to bow down
at the shrines of their forefathers and chiefs leads us to invest
our modern hero with a mythical character, and picture him in our
imagination as a being to whom, a few thousand years ago, al