GEORGE WASHINGTON (1732-1799) HAS become fashionable to question Washington's literary ability and to attribute the authorship of the Farewell Address and of his Inaugurals largely to others. Fortunately, however, the original draft of the Farewell Address as Washington made it has been preserved in his own handwriting, with the alterations and additions made to it after his consultation with his advisers. The manuscript shows that, though he accepted suggestions and amendments with the modesty and good judgment which were always a mode of expression for his great ability, the governing ideas of the address are completely his own, while its literary style also is his, except that, as amended, it formalizes his occasional colloquialisms. Of Washington's life and character it is unnecessary to speak, but it will not be inappropriate to emphasize the facts of his education against the tendency to assume that great virtue and great intellect are separable. His education did not extend to the classics as did that of most Virginia country gentlemen in his time, and because of this it is frequently asserted that "he could not spell"-with the inference that he was ignorant even of the rudiments of an English education. It will be remembered, however, by every one who has studied the growth of the English language that in the first half of the eighteenth century its spelling had not become completely formalized, even in London itself. While the dictionaries of Bailey and others preceded that of Samuel Johnson, that great work did not appear until 1755, and although there was a general tendency to accept it as a conclusive authority, it was not possible that its orthography could at once supplant the habit of phonetic spelling, which had prevailed to a greater or less extent from the time of Alfred the Great until the beginning of the eighteenth century. If Washington was at times individualistic in his spelling and in his syntax, he was no more so than Alfred the Great, whose compositions, in spite of such idiosyncracies, are accepted by all competent authorities as admirable examples of the English of his time. Washington was a man of great intellect, not a great orator, because he had never attempted to cultivate fluency of speech,-preferring, indeed, to reject it and to avoid it, that he might win the |