skill to make it widely popular.  It neither appealed to nor was read by the cultivated and instructed few, but it reached the homes of the masses of the people.  It found its way to the bench of the mechanic, to the house of the farmer, to the log cabins of the frontiersman and pioneer.  It was carried across the continent on the first waves of advancing settlement.  Its anecdotes and its simplicity of thought commended it to children both at home and at school, and, passing through edition after edition, its statements were widely spread, and it colored insensibly the ideas of hundreds of persons who never had heard even the name of the author.  To Weems we owe the anecdote of the cherry-tree, and other tales of a similar nature.  He wrote with Dr. Beattie’s life of his son before him as a model, and the result is that Washington comes out in his pages a faultless prig.  Whether Weems intended it or not, that is the result which he produced, and that is the Washington who was developed from the wide sale of his book.  When this idea took definite and permanent shape it caused a reaction.  There was a revolt against it, for the hero thus engendered had qualities which the national sense of humor could not endure in silence.  The consequence is, that the Washington of Weems has afforded an endless theme for joke and burlesque.  Every professional American humorist almost has tried his hand at it; and with each recurring 22d of February the hard-worked jesters of the daily newspapers take it up and make a little fun out of it, sufficient for the day that is passing over them.  The opportunity is tempting, because of the ease with which fun can be made when that fundamental source of humor, a violent contrast, can be employed.  But there is no irreverence in it all, for the jest is not aimed at the real Washington, but at the Washington portrayed in the Weems biography.  The worthy “rector of Mount Vernon,” as he called himself, meant no harm, and there is a good deal of truth, no doubt, in his book.  But the blameless and priggish boy, and the equally faultless and uninteresting man, whom he originated, have become in the process of development a myth.  So in its further development is the Washington of the humorist a myth.  Both alike are utterly and crudely false.  They resemble their great original as much as Greenough’s classically nude statue, exposed to the incongruities of the North American climate, resembles in dress and appearance the general of our armies and the first President of the United States.

Such are the myth-makers.  They are widely different from the critics who have assailed Washington in a sidelong way, and who can be better dealt with in a later chapter.  These last bring charges which can be met; the myth-maker presents a vague conception, extremely difficult to handle because it is so elusive.