le more remains to be said. Washington had his faults, for
he was human; but they are not easy to point out, so perfect was his
mastery of himself. He was intensely reserved and very silent, and
these are the qualities which gave him the reputation in history
of being distant and unsympathetic. In truth, he had not only warm
affections and a generous heart, but there was a strong vein of
sentiment in his composition. At the same time he was in no wise
romantic, and the ruling element in his make-up was prose, good solid
prose, and not poetry. He did not have the poetical and imaginative
quality so strongly developed in Lincoln. Yet he was not devoid of
imagination, although it was here that he was lacking, if anywhere. He
saw facts, knew them, mastered and used them, and never gave much play
to fancy; but as his business in life was with men and facts, this
deficiency, if it was one, was of little moment. He was also a man of
the strongest passions in every way, but he dominated them; they never
ruled him. Vigorous animal passions were inevitable, of course, in a
man of such a physical make-up as his. How far he gave way to them in
his youth no one knows, but the scandals which many persons now desire
to have printed, ostensibly for the sake of truth, are, so far as
I have been able to learn, with one or two dubious exceptions, of
entirely modern parentage. I have run many of them to earth; nearly
all are destitute of contemporary authority, and they may be relegated
to the dust-heaps.[1] If he gave way to these propensities in his
youth, the only conclusion that I have been able to come to is that he
mastered them when he reached man's estate.

[Footnote 1: The charge in the pamphlet purporting to give an account
of the trial of the New York conspirators in 1776 is of such doubtful
origin and character that it hardly merits consideration, and the only
other allusion is in the well-known intercepted letter of Harrison,
which is of doubtful authenticity in certain passages, open to
suspicion from having been intercepted and published by the enemy and
quite likely to have been at best merely a coarse jest of a character
very common at that period and entirely in keeping with the notorious
habits of life and speech peculiar to the writer. (See Life of John
Adams, iii. 35.)]

He had, too, a fierce temper, and although he gradually subdued it, he
would sometimes lose control of himself and burst out into a tempest
of rage.