must now number more than seventy. Weems
doubtless thought that he was helping God and doing good to Washington
by his offensive and effusive support of rudimentary morals.

Weems had been dead a dozen years when another enemy sprang up. This
was the worthy Jared Sparks, an historian, a professor of history, who
collected with much care the correspondence of George Washington and
edited it in a monumental work. Sparks, however, suffered under the
delusion that something other than fact can be the best substance of
history. According to his tastes, many of Washington's letters were
not sufficiently dignified; they were too colloquial, they even let
slip expressions which no man conscious that he was the model of
propriety, the embodiment of the dignity of history, could have used.
So Mr. Sparks without blushing went through Washington's letters and
substituted for the originals words which he decided were more seemly.
Again the public came to know George Washington, not by his own words,
but by those attributed to him by an overzealous stylist-pedant. Well
might the Father of his Country pray to be delivered from the parsons.

One of the earliest records of Washington's youth is the copy, written
in his beautiful, almost copper-plate hand, of "Rules of Civility &
Decent Behavior, In Company and Conversation." These maxims were taken
from an English book called "The Young Man's Companion," by W. Mather.
It had passed through thirteen editions and contained information upon
many matters besides conduct Perhaps Washington copied the maxims as a
school exercise; perhaps he learned them by heart.

They are for the most part the didactic aphorisms which greatly
pleased our worthy ancestors during the middle of the eighteenth
century and later. Some of the entries referred to simple matters of
deportment: you must not turn your back on persons to whom you talk.
Others touch morals rather than manners. One imagines that the parson
or elderly uncles allowed themselves to bestow this indisputably
correct advice upon the youths whom they were interested in. A boy
brought up rigidly on these doctrines could hardly fail to become a
prig unless he succeeded in following the last injunction of all:
"Labor to keep alive in your heart, that little spark of celestial
fire called conscience."

When he was eleven years old, Washington's father died, and his older
half-brother, Lawrence, who inherited the estate now known as Mount
Vernon