and drags him down to its own level while assuming to lift him to the skies.  How many times have we been told that he was not a man of genius, but a person of “excellent common sense,” of “admirable judgment,” of “rare virtues”! and, by a constant repetition of this odious cant, we have nearly succeeded in divorcing comprehension from his sense, insight from his judgment, force from his virtues, and life from the man.  Accordingly, in the panegyric of cold spirits, Washington disappears in a cloud of commonplaces; in the rhodomontade of boiling patriots, he expires in the agonies of rant.  Now, the sooner this bundle of mediocre talents and moral qualities, which its contrivers have the audacity to call George Washington, is hissed out of existence, the better it will be for the cause of talent and the cause of morals; contempt of that is the condition of insight.  He had no genius, it seems.  O no! genius, we must suppose, is the peculiar and shining attribute of some orator, whose tongue can spout patriotic speeches, or some versifier, whose muse can “Hail Columbia,” but not of the man who supported states on his arm, and carried America in his brain.  The madcap Charles Townshend, the motion of whose pyrotechnic mind was like the whiz of a hundred rockets, is a man of genius; but George Washington raised up above the level of even eminent statesmen, and with a nature moving with the still and orderly celerity of a planet round the sun,—­he dwindles, in comparison, into a kind of angelic dunce!  What is genius?  Is it worth anything.  Is splendid folly the measure of its inspiration?  Is wisdom that which it recedes from, or tends towards?  And by what definition do you award the name to the creator of an epic, and deny it to the creator of a country?  On what principle is it to be lavished on him who sculptures in perishing marble the image of possible excellence, and withheld from him who built up in himself a transcendent character indestructible as the obligations of Duty, and beautiful as her rewards?

Indeed, if by the genius of action you mean will enlightened by intelligence, and intelligence energized by will,—­if force and insight be its characteristics, and influence its test,—­and, especially, if great effects suppose a cause proportionately great, that is, a vital causative mind,—­then is Washington most assuredly a man of genius, and one whom no other American has equaled in the power of working morally and mentally on other minds.  His genius, it is true, was of a peculiar kind, the genius of character, of thought, and the objects of thought solidified and concentrated into active faculty.  He belongs to that rare class of men,—­rare as Homers and Miltons, rare as Platos and Newtons, who have impressed their characters upon nations without pampering national vices.  Such men have natures broad enough to include all the facts of a people’s practical life, and deep enough to discern the spiritual laws which underlie, animate, and govern those facts.  Washington,