of editions of it which must now number more than seventy. Weems
doubtless thought that he was helping God and doing good to Washington
by his offensive and effusive support of rudimentary morals.

Weems had been dead a dozen years when another enemy sprang up. This
was the worthy Jared Sparks, an historian, a professor of history, who
collected with much care the correspondence of George Washington and
edited it in a monumental work. Sparks, however, suffered under the
delusion that something other than fact can be the best substance of
history. According to his tastes, many of Washington's letters were
not sufficiently dignified; they were too colloquial, they even let
slip expressions which no man conscious that he was the model of
propriety, the embodiment of the dignity of history, could have used.
So Mr. Sparks without blushing went through Washington's letters and
substituted for the originals words which he decided were more seemly.
Again the public came to know George Washington, not by his own words,
but by those attributed to him by an overzealous stylist-pedant. Well
might the Father of his Country pray to be delivered from the parsons.

One of the earliest records of Washington's youth is the copy, written
in his beautiful, almost copper-plate hand, of "Rules of Civility &
Decent Behavior, In Company and Conversation." These maxims were taken
from an English book called "The Young Man's Companion," by W. Mather.
It had passed through thirteen editions and contained information upon
many matters besides conduct Perhaps Washington copied the maxims as a
school exercise; perhaps he learned them by heart.

They are for the most part the didactic aphorisms which greatly
pleased our worthy ancestors during the middle of the eighteenth
century and later. Some of the entries referred to simple matters of