nothing intrinsically impossible in either the cherry-tree or
the colt incident, nor would there be in a hundred others which might
be readily invented. The real point is that these stories, as told by
Weems and Mr. Custis, are on their face hopelessly and ridiculously
false. They are so, not merely because they have no vestige of
evidence to support them, but because they are in every word and
line the offspring of a period more than fifty years later. No
English-speaking people, certainly no Virginians, ever thought or
behaved or talked in 1740 like the personages in Weems's stories,
whatever they may have done in 1790, or at the beginning of the next
century. These precious anecdotes belong to the age of Miss Edgeworth
and Hannah More and Jane Taylor. They are engaging specimens of the
"Harry and Lucy" and "Purple Jar" morality, and accurately reflect the
pale didacticism which became fashionable in England at the close of
the last century. They are as untrue to nature and to fact at the
period to which they are assigned as would be efforts to depict
Augustine Washington and his wife in the dress of the French
revolution discussing the propriety of worshiping the Goddess of
Reason.

To enter into any serious historical criticism of these stories would
be to break a butterfly. So much as this even has been said only
because these wretched fables have gone throughout the world, and it
is time that they were swept away into the dust-heaps of history. They
represent Mr. and Mrs. Washington as affected and priggish people,
given to cheap moralizing, and, what is far worse, they have served
to place Washington himself in a ridiculous light to an age which has
outgrown the educational foibles of seventy-five years ago. Augustine
Washington and his wife were a gentleman and lady of the eighteenth
century, living in Virginia. So far as we know without guessing or
conjecture, they were simple, honest, and straight-forward, devoted to
the care of their family and estate, and doing their duty sensibly and
after the fashion of their time. Their son, to whom the greatest wrong
has been done, not only never did anything common or mean, but from
the beginning to the end of his life he was never for an instant
ridiculous or affected, and he was as utterly removed from canting
or priggishness as any human being could well be. Let us therefore
consign the Weems stories and their offspring to the limbo of
historical rubbish, and try t