Washington, we now learn, had huge hands and enormous feet, and stood six feet and three inches in his No. 13 boots. His big nose got fiery red when the wind blew. His hot temper is now a thing to brag about. He hurled leaden ink wells at dastards, and, in the presence of cowardice in battle, he swore past belief. As for lying, why couldn't he tell a lie? asks one biographer savagely—didn't he have a tongue in his head? Then comes along Mr. Henderson and demonstrates quite neatly, out of the diaries, that George did tell a lie—oh, a quite justifiable little white lie, to be sure—in order to be rid of the dust of a troublesome voluntary retinue which persisted in riding before him on his tour through the South. Gradually we recover other little touches of the Virginian gentleman which Weems overlooked; his romantic attachment to an early flame, his dancing all night, his card-playing—losing two to three pounds in an evening, too; his theatergoing, his rapacious appetite for food, his hard riding after foxes, sometimes six or seven hours a day, often ten times in a month, in some years every month.
These are trifling "particularities," but they help destroy the plaster bust.
Now, as I take it, the elaborate publication of Washington's private journals in their entirety is a most significant part of our contemporary effort to recover the whole man.[1] The importance of this contribution will, I am convinced, grow upon us immensely as the record is "creatively" studied, as its laconic, factual memoranda are gradually pieced together, illuminated from other sources and reasoned upon by biographers and historians who know how to utilize a vast collection
- ↑ The Diaries of George Washington, Boston, 1925, four vols.
