but he exactly calculated every man’s value, and gave him a solid esteem proportioned to it.  His person, you know, was fine, his stature exactly what one would wish, his deportment easy, erect, and noble; the best horseman of his age, and the most, graceful figure that could be seen on horseback.  Although in the circle of his friends, where he might be unreserved with safety, he took a free share in conversation, his colloquial talents were not above mediocrity, possessing neither copiousness of ideas, nor fluency of words.  In public, when called on for a sudden opinion, he was unready, short, and embarrassed.  Yet he wrote readily, rather diffusely, in an easy and correct style.  This he had acquired by conversation with the world, for his education was merely reading, writing, and common arithmetic, to which he added surveying at a later day.  His time was employed in action chiefly, reading little, and that only in agriculture and English history.  His correspondence became necessarily extensive, and, with journalizing his agricultural proceedings, occupied most of his leisure hours within doors.  On the whole, his character was, in its mass, perfect, in nothing bad, in few points indifferent; and it may truly be said, that never did nature and fortune combine more perfectly to make a man great, and to place him in the same constellation with whatever worthies have merited from man an everlasting remembrance.  For his was the singular destiny and merit, of leading the armies of his country successfully through an arduous war, for the establishment of its independence; of conducting its councils through the birth of a government, new in its forms and principles, until it had settled down into a quiet and orderly train; and of scrupulously obeying the laws through the whole of his career, civil and military, of which the history of the world furnishes no other example.  How, then, can it be perilous for you to take such a man on your shoulders?  I am satisfied the great body of republicans think of him as I do.  We were, indeed, dissatisfied with him on his ratification of the British treaty.  But this was short-lived.  We knew his honesty, the wiles with which he was encompassed, and that age had already begun to relax the firmness of his purposes; and I am convinced he is more deeply seated in the love and gratitude of the republicans, than in the Pharisaical homage of the federal monarchists.  For he was no monarchist from preference of his judgment.  The soundness of that gave him correct views of the rights of man, and his severe justice devoted him to them.  He has often declared to me that he considered our new constitution as an experiment on the practicability of republican government, and with what dose of liberty man could be trusted for his own good; that he was determined the experiment should have a fair trial, and would lose the last drop of his blood in support of it.  And these declarations he repeated to me the oftener and the more pointedly, because he knew