means
of its gratification, nor was personal aggrandizement its object. The
various high and important stations to which he was called by the public
voice, were unsought by himself; and, in consenting to fill them, he
seems rather to have yielded to a general conviction that the interests
of his country would be thereby promoted, than to an avidity for power.

"Neither the extraordinary partiality of the American people, the
extravagant praises which were bestowed upon him, nor the inveterate
opposition and malignant calumnies which he encountered, had any visible
influence upon his conduct. The cause is to be looked for in the texture
of his mind. To him, that innate and unassuming modesty which adulation
would have offended, which the voluntary plaudits of millions could not
betray into indiscretion, and which never intruded upon others his
claims to superior consideration, was happily blended with a high and
correct sense of personal dignity, and with a just consciousness of that
respect which is due to station. Without exertion, he could maintain the
happy medium between that arrogance which wounds and that facility which
allows the office to be degraded in the person who fills it.

"It is impossible to contemplate the great events which have occurred in
the United States under the auspices of Washington, without ascribing
them, in some measure, to him. If we ask the causes of the prosperous
issue of a war, against the successful termination of which there were
so many probabilities; of the good which was produced, and the ill which
was avoided, during an administration fated to contend with the
strongest prejudices that a combination of circumstances and of passions
could produce; of the favor of the great mass of his fellow-citizens,
and of the confidence which, to the last moment of his life, they
reposed in him--the answer, so far as these causes may be found in his
character, will furnish a lesson well meriting the attention of those
who are candidates for political fame.

"Endowed by nature with a sound judgment and an accurate, discriminating
mind, he feared not that laborious attention which made him perfectly
master of those subjects, in all their relations, on which he was to
decide. And this essential quality was guided by an unvarying sense of
moral right, which would tolerate the employment only of those means
that would bear the most rigid examination; by a fairness of intention
which neither sought