llen behind in his studies.

"My boy," he said, "you must study if you would succeed. Only patience
and industry will prevent your failure here and your failure in after
life."

"But, General, you failed," replied the sophomore with an amazing
impertinence.

"I hope that you may be more fortunate than I," was the quiet answer.

Literature contains nothing finer than that by way of the retort
courteous.

The speaker was Robert E. Lee--the time not many months after the
surrender of the Southern army. Many were there to brand him as a
"failure," just as this thoughtless sophomore had done, and to all such
critics his reply was silence. In the seclusion of a small Virginia
college he lived and worked, keeping sedulously out of public affairs,
writing and saying nothing about his campaigns. He left to history the
final verdict, which has found him, not a failure, but one of the most
brilliant soldiers of this or any land.

In Lee's early life and ancestry his nearest parallel is Washington.
These two greatest Virginians were born within a few miles of each
other, in Westmoreland County. Lee was born just seventy-five years
after Washington, (January 19, 1807) and like him was descended of
famous lineage. His father, Light Horse Harry Lee, fought by the side
of Washington in the Revolutionary War; and it was he who in a memorial
address on the great leader coined the immortal phrase: "First in war,
first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen."

Still another ancestor, Richard Henry Lee, had been born many years
earlier in the same old mansion where Robert Edward Lee first saw the
light of day. Richard Lee it was, who was a boyhood friend and
confidant of George Washington; and who later became one of the signers
of the Declaration of Independence.

It is not strange, therefore, to find that the career of the first
great Virginian profoundly influenced the second. "One familiar with
the life of Lee," says Thomas Nelson Page, "cannot help noting the
strong resemblance of his character in its strength, its poise, its
rounded completeness, to that of Washington; or fail to mark what
influence the life of Washington had on the life of Lee. The stamp
appears upon it from his boyhood, and grows more plain as his years
progress."

The old homestead in which Lee was born deserves some notice on its own
account. It was built by Thomas Lee, a grandson of Richard Lee, the
emigrant who came to Virginia