Page:American Historical Review, Volume 12.djvu/909

Rh sufficient stories of Washington in his varied public relations; but the present writer has done neither. His intimate relations do not touch the real Washington, his presentation of the man of public affairs has the least possible regard for the problems or conditions of the time, and his whole picture is unreal.

To be more specific: "The strong, controlled passion of a soul which strove in vain to spend itself on men and affairs, now, at twenty-six, turned its ardour [sic] towards a lovely woman who was, like the gallant colonel himself, a 'consummate flower' of the Virginia planter commonwealth " (p. 114). And again, "Having married a fashionable woman, a sensible 'nut-brown' maid … Washington felt it necessary to be fashionable too, in all his dress and appointments" (p. 129). Probably Professor Harrison is the first man to attribute Washington's care to make a good appearance to the influence of his "nut-brown maid" who at the time of her marriage was the mother of two children. Washington's presidency is given to us in one chapter of twenty-seven-pages, the first six of which bring us through the inauguration ceremonies of 1789. In the remaining part of the chapter there is but the slightest grasp of the subject. We are told: "The dear old mother-country had erred grievously in her behaviour [sic] toward her child, but Washington, forgiving but not forgetting, could not bring himself to break with her, eminent as were the claims of France to his gratitude, when the French war came on in the nineties. He loved England too much to set himself against her, and this exceeding affection at last put Britain—reversing Scripture—into the position of the prodigal mother who, having spent her immeasurable wealth of colonies in riotous living, came to fall at the feet of her child and ask its pardon" (p. 429). The scriptural allusion may be above criticism, although to the reviewer it seems a little mixed; but we may well ask, when did England fall at the feet of America during either the presidency or the life-time of Washington? Was it at the time of the Jay treaty? Or was it at the time of the French difficulty—which was not a war—when she was still insisting on the right of impressment and smiling to see how near the prospect of war with France was bringing, not England to America's feet, but America to England's?

the second war with England and the era of the Civil War there is one period which has been the favorite study of historians, and there is one typical character, the strenuous hero of that generation, who has always possessed an unfailing attraction for biographers. That period is the decade which scarcely contains the first three