exact; liberal in contributions to whatever promised
utility; but frowning and unyielding on all visionary projects, and all
unworthy calls on his charity. His heart was not warm in its affections;
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 h