of the perfect statesman by Senator Lodge or President-to-be Wilson.
In olden days people had to have these classicized representations of the Mount Vernon farmer to hang in the legislative halls of the new states, and to erect on public squares, and to exhibit in Europe, and to include in the Statesman's Series. The poor old hero resigned himself in the end to being sublime, just as he had resigned himself to being commander-in-chief and President. He never visibly winced under it. He saw it through, thrusting his prominent chin out further than ever; in which, as Roscoe Thayer suggested, an ill-fitting set of false teeth—wooden—probably assisted. But his eyelids are a little weary.
It is a curious fact that the first great popular biography of Washington, published in the year following his death by the parson of Mount Vernon parish, the celebrated Mason L. Weems, was a protest against transmitting to posterity this classicized warrior and statesman, the official Washington. In the period when Sir Joshua Reynolds was explaining to the Royal Academy that an historical work in the grand style must not be allowed to run into "particularities," but must exhibit the hero only in his heroic aspects and with "as much dignity as the human figure is capable of receiving"—in this grand classicizing period this miserable Parson Weems strongly revolted against demi-godding his neighbor.
Somehow he got it fixed in his poor pious little head that the lovable Washington was the "private citizen," the man whom he had seen year after year planting his turnips and being diligent in business and serving the Lord once or twice a month in Pohick Church, along with Mrs. Washington and Patsy and Jacky
