painful iteration, and the natural result has followed.  Many persons have felt the sense of fatigue which the Athenians expressed practically by their oyster shells, and have been led to cast doubts on Washington’s perfection as the only consolation for their own sense of injury.  Then, again, Washington’s fame has been so overshadowing, and his greatness so immutable, that he has been very inconvenient to the admirers and the biographers of other distinguished men.  From these two sources, from the general jealousy of the classic Greek variety, and the particular jealousy born of the necessities of some other hero, much adverse and misleading criticism has come.  It has never been a safe or popular amusement to assail Washington directly, and this course usually has been shunned; but although the attacks have been veiled they have none the less existed, and they have been all the more dangerous because they were insidious.

In his lifetime Washington had his enemies and detractors in abundance.  During the Revolution he was abused and intrigued against, thwarted and belittled, to a point which posterity in general scarcely realizes.  Final and conclusive victory brought an end to this, and he passed to the presidency amid a general acclaim.  Then the attacks began again.  Their character has been shown in a previous chapter, but they were of no real moment except as illustrations of the existence and meaning of party divisions.  The ravings of Bache and Freneau, and the coarse insults of Giles, were all totally unimportant in themselves.  They merely define the purposes and character of the party which opposed Washington, and but for him would be forgotten.  Among his eminent contemporaries, Jefferson and Pickering, bitterly opposed in all things else, have left memoranda and letters reflecting upon the abilities of their former chief.  Jefferson disliked him because he blocked his path, but with habitual caution he never proceeded beyond a covert sneer implying that Washington’s mental powers, at no time very great, were impaired by age during his presidency, and that he was easily deceived by practised intriguers.  Pickering, with more boldness, set Washington down as commonplace, not original in his thought, and vastly inferior to Hamilton, apparently because he was not violent, and did not make up his mind before he knew the facts.

Adverse contemporary criticism, however, is slight in amount and vague in character; it can be readily dismissed, and it has in no case weight enough to demand much consideration.  Modern criticism of the same kind has been even less direct, but is much more serious and cannot be lightly passed over.  It invariably proceeds by negations setting out with an apparently complete acceptance of Washington’s greatness, and then assailing him by telling us what he was not.  Few persons who have not given this matter a careful study realize how far criticism of this sort has gone, and there is indeed no better way of learning what Washington really was than by examining the various negations which tell us what he was not.