lying at Torbay, lowered his flag half-mast, every ship following the example; and Bonaparte, First Consul of France, on announcing his death to the army, ordered that black crape should be suspended from all the standards and flags, throughout the public service, for ten days.

In the preceding parts of our work we have traced the career of Washington from early boyhood to his elevation to the Presidential chair. It was an elevation he had neither sought nor wished; for when the independence of his country was achieved, the modest and cherished desire of his heart had been "to live and die a private citizen on his own farm";* and he had shaped out for himself an ideal elysium in his beloved shades of Mount Vernon. But power sought him in his retirement. The weight and influence of his name and character were deemed all essential to complete his work; to set the new government in motion, and conduct it through its first perils and trials. With unfeigned reluctance he complied with the imperative claims of his country, and accepted the power thus urged upon him: advancing to its exercise with diffidence, and aiming to surround himself with men of the highest talent and information whom he might consult in emergency; but firm and strong in the resolve in all things to act as his conscience told him was "right as it respected his God, his country, and himself." For he knew no divided fidelity, no separate obligation; his most sacred duty to himself was his highest duty to his country and his God.

In treating of his civil administration in this closing part, we have endeavored to show how truly he adhered to this

* Writings, ix., p. 412.

resolve, and with what inflexible integrity and scrupulous regard to the public weal he discharged his functions. In executing our task, we have not indulged in discussions of temporary questions of controverted policy which agitated the incipient establishment of our government, but have given his words and actions as connected with those questions, and as illustrative of his character. In this part, as in those which treat of his military career, we have avoided rhetorical amplification and embellishments, and all gratuitous assumptions, and have sought, by simple and truthful details, to give his character an opportunity of developing itself, and of manifesting those fixed principles and that noble consistency which reigned alike throughout his civil and his military career.

The character of Washington may want some of those poetical elements which dazzle and delight the multitude, but it possessed fewer inequalities, and a rarer union of virtues than perhaps ever fell to the lot of one man. Prudence, firmness, sagacity, moderation, an overruling judgment, an immovable justice, courage that never faltered, patience that never wearied, truth that disdained all artifice, magnanimity without alloy. It seems as if Providence had endowed him in a pre-eminent degree with the qualities requisite to fit him for the high destiny he was called upon to fulfill-to conduct a momentous revolution which was to form an era in the history of the world, and to inaugurate a new and untried government, which, to use his own words, was to lay the foundation "for the enjoyment of much purer civil liberty, and greater public happiness, than have hitherto been the portion of mankind."

The fame of Washington stands apart from every other in history; shining with a truer luster and a more benignant

glory. With us his memory remains a national property, where all sympathies throughout our widely extended and diversified empire meet in unison. Under all dissensions and amid all the storms of party, his precepts and example speak to us from the grave with a paternal appeal; and his name-by all revered-forms a universal tie of brotherhood —a watchword of our Union.

"It will be the duty of the historian and the sage of all nations," writes an eminent British statesman (Lord Brougham), "to let no occasion pass of commemorating this illustrious man; and until time shall be no more will a test of the progress which our race has made in wisdom and virtue be derived from the veneration paid to the immortal name of Washington."

APPENDIX

I

PORTRAITS OF WASHINGTON

[THE following notices of the various representations of Washington, which have been prepared by the publisher for the illustrated edition of this work, are kindly furnished by Mr. H. T. TUCKERMAN, from a volume which he has now in press.]

THE earliest portraits of Washington are more interesting, perhaps, as memorials than as works of art; and we can easily imagine that associations endeared them to his old comrades. The dress (blue coat, scarlet facings, and underclothes) of the first portrait, by Peale, and the youthful face, make it suggestive of the first experience of the future commander, when, exchanging the surveyor's implements for the colonel's commission, he bivouacked in the wilderness of Ohio, the leader of a motley band of hunters, provincials, and savages, to confront wily Frenchmen, cut forest roads, and encounter all the perils of Indian ambush, inclement skies, undisciplined followers, famine, and woodland skirmish. It recalls his calm authority and providential escape amid the dismay of Braddock's defeat, and his pleasant sensation at the first whistling of bullets in the weary march to Fort Necessity. To CHARLES WILSON PEALE we owe this precious relic of the chieftain's youth. His own career partook of the vicissitudes and was impressed with the spirit of the Revolutionary era; a captain of volunteers at the battles of Trenton and Germantown, and a State representative of Pennsylvania, a favorite pupil of West, an ingenious mecha

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nician, and a warrior, he always cherished the instinct and the faculty for art; and even amid the bustle and duties of the camp, never failed to seize auspicious intervals of leisure to depict his brother officers. This portrait was

executed in 1772, and is now at Arlington House.

The resolution of Congress, by which a portrait by this artist was ordered, was passed before the occupation of Philadelphia. Its progress marks the vicissitudes of the Revolutionary struggle; commenced in the gloomy winter and half-famished encampment at Valley Forge, in 1778, the battles of Trenton, Princeton, and Monmouth intervened before its completion. At the last place Washington suggested that the view from the window of the farmhouse opposite to which he was sitting would form a desirable background. Peale adopted the idea, and represented Monmouth Court-house and a party of Hessians under guard, marching out of it. The picture was finished at Princeton, and Nassau Hall is a prominent object in the background; but Congress adjourned without making an appropriation, and it remained in the artist's hands. Lafayette desired a copy for the king of France; and Peale executed one in 1779, which was sent to Paris: but the misfortunes of the royal family occasioned its sale, and it became the property of the Count de Menou, who brought it again to this country, and presented it to the National Institute, where it is now preserved. Chapman made two copies at a thousand dollars each; and Dr. Craik, one of the earliest and warmest personal friends of Washington, their commissions as officers in the French War having been signed on the same day (1754), declared it a most faithful likeness of him as he appeared in the prime of his life.t

MS. Letter of Titian R. Peale to George Livermore, Esq.

† PHILADELPHIA, Feb. 4. - His Excellency General Washington set off from this city to join the army in New Jersey. During the course of his short stay, the only relief he has enjoyed from service since he first entered it, he has