The date prefixed is that of the visit which the Prince of Wales paid to
the tomb of Washington: carrying home thence, as one of the most
distinguished of his hosts said, 'an unwritten treaty of amity and
alliance.'
Mount Vernon on the Potomac, named after the Admiral, was the family seat
of Augustine, father to George Washington, and the residence of the
latter from 1752. But all his early years also had been spent in that
neighbourhood, in those country pursuits which formed his ideal of life:
and thither, on resigning his commission as Commander-in-Chief, he
retired in 1785; devoting himself to farming and gardening with all the
strenuousness and devoted passion of a Roman of Vergil's type. And there
(Dec. 1799) was he buried.
_Not eager_; When the ill-feeling between England and America deepened
after 1765, Washington 'was less eager than some others in declaring or
declaiming against the mother country;' (Mahon: _Hist_. ch. lii).
_Ripe to wed with Liberty_; See _Appendix_ G.
_And to the end_; See Petrarch's beautiful lines: _Trionfo della Morte_,
cap. I.
_Due to the Liberator_; Compare the epitaph by Ennius on Scipio:
Hic est ille situs, cui nemo civi' neque hostis
Quivit pro factis reddere opis pretium.
History, it may be said with reasonable confidence, records no hero more
unselfish, no one less stained with human error and frailty, than George
Washington.
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