d not understand. He was a lover of
books, collected a library, and read always as much as his crowded
life would permit. When he was at Newburgh, at the close of the war,
he wrote to Colonel Smith in New York to send him the following
books:--

"Charles the XIIth of Sweden.
Lewis the XVth, 2 vols.
History of the Life and Reign of the Czar Peter the Great.
Campaigns of Marshal Turenne.
Locke on the Human Understanding.
Robertson's History of America, 2 vols.
Robertson's History of Charles V.
Voltaire's Letters.
Life of Gustavus Adolphus.
Sully's Memoirs.
Goldsmith's Natural History.
Mildman on Trees.
Vertot's Revolution of Rome, 3 vols.
Vertot's Revolution of Portugal, 3 vols.
{The Vertot's if they are in estimation.}

If there is a good Bookseller's shop in the City, I would thank
you for sending me a catalogue of the Books and their prices that
I may choose such as I want."

His tastes ran to history and to works treating of war or agriculture,
as is indicated both by this list and some earlier ones. It is not
probable that he gave so much attention to lighter literature,
although he wrote verses in his youth, and by an occasional allusion
in his letters he seems to have been familiar with some of the great
works of the imagination, like "Don Quixote."[1]

[Footnote 1: At his death the appraisers of the estate found 863
volumes in his library, besides a great number of pamphlets,
magazines, and maps. This was a large collection of books for those
days, and showed that the possessor, although purely a man of affairs,
loved reading and had literary tastes.]

He never freed himself from the self-distrust caused by his profound
sense of his own deficiencies in education, on the one hand, and
his deep reverence for learning, on the other. He had fought the
Revolution, which opened the way for a new nation, and was at the
height of his fame when he wrote to the French officers, who begged
him to visit France, that he was "too old to learn French or to talk
with ladies;" and it was this feeling in a large measure which kept
him from ever being a maker of phrases or a sayer of brilliant things.
In other words, the fact that he was modest and sensitive has been the
chief cause of his being thought dull and cold. This idea, moreover,
is wholly that of posterity, for there is not the slightest indication
on the part of any contemporary that Washington could not talk well
and did