'Tis not the practice of writers to choose for biography men who have
made no more noise in the world than Captain Winwood has; nor the act
of gentlemen, in ordinary cases, to publish such private matters as
this recital will present. But I consider, on the one hand, that
Winwood's history contains as much of interest, and as good an example
of manly virtues, as will be found in the life of many a hero more
renowned; and, on the other, that his story has been so partially
known, and so distorted, it becomes indeed the duty of a gentleman,
when that gentleman was his nearest friend, to put forth that story
truly, and so give the lie for ever to the detractors of a brave and
kindly man.

There was a saying in the American army, proceeding first from Major
Harry Lee, of their famous Light Horse, that Captain Winwood was in
America, in the smaller way his modesty permitted, what the Chevalier
Bayard was in France, and Sir Philip Sidney in England. This has been
received more than once (such is the malice of conscious inferiority)
with derisive smiles or supercilious sneers; and not only by certain
of his own countrymen, but even in my presence, when my friendship for
Winwood, though I had been his rival in love and his enemy in war, was
not less known than was my quickness to take offence and avenge it. I
dealt with one such case, at the hour of dawn, in a glade near the
Bowery lane, a little way out of New York. And I might have continued
to vindicate my friend's character so: either with pistols, as at
Weehawken across the Hudson, soon after the war, I vindicated the
motives of us Englishmen of American birth who stood for the king in
the war of Independence; or with rapiers, as I defended the name of
our admired enemy, Washington, against a certain defamer, one morning
in Hyde Park, after I had come to London. But it has occurred to me