so
much as the orthography or rules of grammar of his own tongue. His
culture was altogether his own work, and he was in the strictest sense a
self-made man; yet from his early life he never seemed uneducated. At
sixteen, he went into the wilderness as a surveyor, and for three years
continued the pursuit, where the forests trained him, in meditative
solitude, to freedom and largeness of mind; and nature revealed to him
her obedience to serene and silent laws. In his intervals from toil, he
seemed always to be attracted to the best men, and to be cherished by
them. Fairfax, his employer, an Oxford scholar, already aged, became his
fast friend. He read little, but with close attention. Whatever he took
in hand he applied himself to with care; and his papers, which have been
preserved, show how he almost imperceptibly gained the power of writing
correctly; always expressing himself with clearness and directness,
often with felicity of language and grace.

When the frontiers on the west became disturbed, he at nineteen was
commissioned an adjutant-general with the rank of major. At twenty-one,
he went as the envoy of Virginia to the council of Indian chiefs on the
Ohio, and to the French officers near Lake Erie. Fame waited upon him
from his youth; and no one of his colony was so much spoken of. He
conducted the first military expedition from Virginia that crossed the
Alleghanies. Braddock selected him as an aid, and he was the only man
who came out of the disastrous defeat near the Monongahela, with
increased reputation, which extended to England. The next year, when he
was but four-and-twenty, "the great esteem" in which he was held in
Virginia, and his "real merit," led the lieutenant-governor of Maryland
to request that he might be "commissioned and appointed second in
command" of the army designed to march to the Ohio; and Shirley, the
commander-in-chief, heard the proposal "with great satisfaction and
pleasure," for "he knew no provincial officer upon the continent to whom
he would so readily give that rank as to Washington." In 1758 he acted
under Forbes as a brigadier, and but for him that general would never
have crossed the mountains.

Courage was so natural to him that it was hardly spoken of to his
praise; no one ever at any moment of his life discovered in him the
least shrinking in danger; and he had a hardihood of daring which
escaped notice, because it was so enveloped by superior calmness
and wisdom.