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, altars would
have been builded and libations poured out.

Thus we have to-day in our minds a Washington grand, solemn, and
impressive. In this guise he appears as a man of lofty intellect, vast
moral force, supremely successful and fortunate, and wholly apart
from and above all his fellow-men. This lonely figure rises up to our
imagination with all the imperial splendor of the Livian Augustus, and
with about as much warmth and life as that unrivaled statue. In this
vague but quite serious idea there is a great deal of truth, but
not the whole truth. It is the myth of genuine love and veneration
springing from the inborn gratitude of man to the founders and chiefs