Note 1272 — Chapter VIII · (continued 2)

Sparks’s Catal., p. 224; also Sparks’s Washington, i. 48, ii. p. x. Sparks considered that these papers “filled up the chasm occasioned by the loss of Washington’s papers” in the Braddock campaign. Referring to Washington’s letters during the French war, Sparks (ii., introd.) says that Washington, twenty or thirty years after they were written, caused them to be copied, after he had revised them, and it is in this amended condition they are preserved, though several originals still exist. In his reply to Mahon (Cambridge, 1852, p. 30) Sparks says that this revision by Washington showed “numerous erasures, interlineations, and corrections in almost every letter,” probably meaning in those whose originals are preserved. With the canons governing Sparks as an editor, this revision was followed in his edition of Washington’s Writings; but the historian regrets, as he reads the record in Sparks’s volumes, that the Washington of the French war has partly disappeared in the riper character which he became after he had known the experiences of the American Revolution.