Note (return) — Chapter VII · GEORGE WASHINGTON

These qualities were, of course, gifts of nature, improved and developed by the training of a life of action on a great scale. He had received, indeed, little teaching except that of experience, and the world of war and politics had been to him both school and college. His education had been limited in the extreme, scarcely going beyond the most rudimentary branches except in mathematics, and this is very apparent in his early letters. He seems always to have written a handsome hand and to have been good at figures, but his spelling at the outset was far from perfect, and his style, although vigorous, was abrupt and rough. He felt this himself, took great pains to correct his faults in this respect, and succeeded, as he did in most things. Mr. Sparks has produced a false impression in this matter by smoothing and amending in very extensive fashion all the earlier letters, so as to give an appearance of uniformity throughout the correspondence; a process which not only destroyed much of the vigor and force of the early writings, but made them somewhat unnatural. The surveyor and frontier soldier wrote very differently from the general of the army and the President of the United States, and the improvements of Mr. Sparks only served to hide the real man.1