the Washington of the
popular fancy. The idea grew up with the country, and became so
ingrained in the popular thought that finally everybody was affected
by it, and even the most stately and solemn of the Washington
biographers adopted the unsupported tales of the itinerant parson and
book-peddler.

In regard to the public life of Washington, Weems took the facts known
to every one, and drawn for the most part from the gazettes. He then
dressed them up in his own peculiar fashion and gave them to the
world. All this, forming of course nine tenths of his book, has
passed, despite its success, into oblivion. The remaining tenth
described Washington's boyhood until his fourteenth or fifteenth year,
and this, which is the work of the author's imagination, has lived.
Weems, having set himself up as absolutely the only authority as to
this period, has been implicitly followed, and has thus come to demand
serious consideration. Until Weems is weighed and disposed of, we
cannot even begin an attempt to get at the real Washington.

Weems was not a cold-blooded liar, a mere forger of anecdotes. He was
simply a man destitute of historical sense, training, or morals, ready
to take the slenderest fact and work it up for the purposes of the
market until it became almost as impossible to reduce it to its
original dimensions as it was for the fisherman to get the Afrit back
into his jar. In a word, Weems was an approved myth-maker. No better
example can be given than the way in which he described himself. It
is believed that he preached once, and possibly oftener, to a
congregation which numbered Washington among its members. Thereupon he
published himself in his book as the rector of Mount Vernon parish.
There was, to begin with, no such parish. There was Truro parish, in
which was a church called indifferently Pohick or Mount Vernon church.
Of this church Washington was a vestryman until 1785, when he joined
the church at Alexandria. The Rev. Lee Massey was the clergyman of the
Mount Vernon church, and the church at Alexandria had nothing to do
with Mount Vernon. There never was, moreover, such a person as the
rector of Mount Vernon parish, but it was the Weems way of treating
his appearance before the great man, and of deceiving the world with
the notion of an intimacy which the title implied.

Weems, of course, had no difficulty with the public life, but in
describing the boyhood he was thrown on his own resources, and out
of