Writing," has thirty folio pages, and the contents, all in his boyish
handwriting, are sufficiently curious. Amid copied forms of exchange,
bonds, receipts, sales, and similar exercises, occasionally, in ornate
penmanship, there are poetic selections, among them lines of a religious
tone on "True Happiness." But the great interest of the book centres in
the pages headed: "Rules of Civility and Decent Behaviour in Company
and Conversation." The book had been gnawed at the bottom by Mount
Vernon mice, before it reached the State Archives, and nine of the 110
Rules have thus suffered, the sense of several being lost.

The Rules possess so much historic interest that it seems surprising
that none of Washington's biographers or editors should have given them
to the world. Washington Irving, in his "Life of Washington," excites
interest in them by a tribute, but does not quote even one. Sparks
quotes 57, but inexactly, and with his usual literary manipulation;
these were reprinted (1886, 16°) by W.O. Stoddard, at Denver, Colorado;
and in Hale's "Washington" (1888). I suspect that the old biographers,
more eulogistic than critical, feared it would be an ill service to
Washington's fame to print all of the Rules. There might be a scandal in
the discovery that the military and political deity of America had, even
in boyhood, written so gravely of the hat-in-hand deference due to
lords, and other "Persons of Quality," or had concerned himself with
things so trivial as the proper use of the fork, napkin, and toothpick.
Something is said too about "inferiours," before whom one must not "Act
ag'tt y'e Rules Moral." But in 1888 the Rules were subjected to careful
and literal treatment by Dr. J.M. Toner, of Washington City, in the
course of his magnanimous task of preserving, in the Library of
Congress, by exact copies, the early and perishing note-books and
journals of Washington. This able literary antiquarian has printed his
transcript of the Rules (W.H. Morrison: Washington, D.C. 1888), and the