[Illustration: President Washington

_From the portrait by John Vanderlyn, in the Capitol at Washington_

_This full-length portrait of our First President is the work of an
artist to whom Napoleon I awarded a gold medal for his "Marius Among
the Ruins of Carthage," and another of whose masterpieces, "Ariadne in
Naxos," is pronounced one of the finest nudes in the history of
American art. For Vanderlyn sat many other notable public men,
including Monroe, Madison, Calhoun, Clinton, Zachary Taylor and Aaron
Burr, who was his patron and whose portrait by Vanderlyn hangs in the
New York Metropolitan Museum of Art. Nevertheless, Vanderlyn failed in
achieving the success his genius merited, and he once declared
bitterly that "no one but a professional quack can live in America."
Poverty paralyzed his energies, and in 1852, old and discouraged he
retired to his native town of Kingston, New York, so poor that he had
to borrow twenty-five cents to pay the expressage of his trunk.
Obtaining a bed at the local hotel, he was found dead in it the next
morning, in his seventy-seventh year._]




CONTENTS


CHAPTER I.

G. Washington again unanimously elected President.... War between