Norman Conquest, or the Saxon Conquest, if they see fit and have any lights by which to grope their way, is all very well. In such a case we should not presume to criticise. But American biography, if the subject of it happens to have a genealogy, seems to us to begin most fitly with the arrival of the ances-, tors of the family upon these American shores. That is our Norman Conquest, and Saxon Conquest, too. The matter which forms the first fifteen pages of Mr. Irving's first chapter, we should have no objection to as a note, but standing in the forefront, as it does, of Washington's biography, it seems to us decidedly out of place. Nor has this objection failed to be felt by the author himself. "We have entered," he says at the end of the chapter, "with some minuteness, into this genealogical detail, tracing the family step by step through the pages of historical documents for upwards of six centuries; and we have been tempted to do so by the documentary proofs of the lineal and enduring worth of the race. have shown that for many generations, and through a variety of eventful scenes, it has maintained an equality of fortune and respectability with honor and loyalty. Hereditary rank may be an illusion, but hereditary virtue gives a patent of innate nobleness beyond all the blazonry of the herald's college."

We

There are, no doubt, cases which would well justify, and even demand of an American biographer, a departure from the strict rule above laid down; and if, in this instance, the facts of the case sustained the excuse offered, we should be willing to admit it. But temptation in this case, as often happens, has assumed a form which does not rightfully belong to it. There is nothing in what we are told of the De Wessyngtons, lords of the manor of Wessyngton, (who are set down by the English herald-offices as the progenitors of the Washingtons,) that gives any proof of "lineal enduring worth," or "hereditary virtue." About all that is known of them is, that for three centuries, beginning with 1183, they were feudal tenants of the county palatine of Durham, about whose bishops, (who were at the same time counts palatine, with an almost independent jurisdiction) we are told by Mr. Irving a great deal more than about the De Wessyngtons. Very curious matter, no doubt, but entirely out

of place in a biography of Washington. The only facts about any of these De Wessyngtons, beyond the appearance, in old records and grants of land, of the names of some of them-the surname of De Wessyngton having been assumed from that of their manor-are these:William Weshington, of Weshington, fought for Henry III. against De Mountfort, at the battle of Lewes in 1234, at which that feeble prince was taken prisoner; but from what motives William Weshington fought, whether he brought up the rear of the rout, or was one of the first to run away, we are entirely in the dark. Stephen De Wessyngton, bearing for his device a golden rose on an azure shield, took part in a tilt or tournament at Dunstable in 1334, but how he acquitted himself on that occasion we know as little as in the preceding case. Sir William DeWeschington, subsequent to 1367, was one of the privy council of the county palatine; whether a wise or a foolish councillor we know not. On his death, leaving only a daughter, the manor of Wessyington, by her marriage, passed out of the family. This was previous to 1400; but subsequently to that event, in 1614, John De Wessyngton, probably some collateral relative, was chosen prior of the Benedictine convent of Durham-the rights of which position, as placing the prior next in rank to the bishop, and endowing him with a certain palatine-like independence, he zealously maintained, not only against the encroachments of the archdeacon, but against those of the bishop himself. Some of his polemical tracts are still preserved in manuscript in the library of the dean and chapter; and his tombstone, but with an obliterated inscription, is still to be seen in the aisle of the church which formerly belonged to the priory.

66

To these barren facts about the De Wessyngtons, Mr. Irving has added some conjectures as to what might have happened. Hugh De Pusar (or De Pudsay),” he tells us, "during whose episcopate we meet with the first trace of the De Wessyngtons, was a nephew of King Stephen, and a prelate of great pretensions, proud of appearing with a train of ecclesiastics and an armed retinue. When Richard Coeur de Lion put everything to pawn and sale to raise funds for a crusade to the Holy Land, the bishop resolved

to accompany him. More wealthy than his sovereign, he made magnificent preparations. Beside ships to convey his troops and retinue, he had a sumptuous galley for himself fitted up with a throne or episcopal chair of silver, and all the utensils, even culinary, were of the same costly material. In a word, had not the prelate been induced to stay at home, and aid the king with his treasures, by being made one of the regents of the kingdom, and Earl of Northumberland for life, the De Wessyngtons might have followed the banner of St. Cuthbert to the holy wars." An ancestor of Washington crusading to Palestine, and fighting under the banner of St. Cuthbert for the Holy Sepulchre, would afford doubtless a very pretty picture to hang up in the hall of the family mansion at Mount Vernon; but in this case the artist is obliged to draw rather strongly on his imagination. Who knows that, at that time, the De Wessyngton family had a member capable of such an expedition, or inclined to undertake it? If such an one there were, he might, to be sure, have followed the bishop thither-but, then, the bishop did not go.

Other passages we have of the same sort, supported, too, by learned citations. During the splendid pontificate of Anthony Beke (or Beak), the knights of the palatinate had continually to be in the saddle, or buckled in armor. The prelate was so impatient of rest, that he never took more than one sleep, saying it was unbecoming a man to turn from one side to another in bed. was perpetually, when within his diocese, riding from one manor to another, or hunting and hawking. Twice he assisted Edward with all his force in

He

invading Scotland. In the progress northward with the king, the bishop led the van, marching a day in advance of the main body, with a mercenary force, paid by himself, of one thousand foot and five hundred horse. Beside these, he had his feudatories of the palatinate, six bannermen and one hundred and sixty knights, not one of whom, says an old poem, but surpassed Arthur himself, though endowed with the charmed gifts of Merlin. We presume the De Wessyngtons were among the three great chevaliers, as the banner of St. Cuthbert had been taken from its shrine on the occasion," and so on. It is easy to presume, and often very convenient,

but that is not exactly the way in which to write biographies, or even genealogies. It is, indeed, by this very sort of presumptions-in which, most generally, the wish is father to the thought—that so many false facts, to use an expressive though somewhat Irish phrase of Jefferson's, have crept and do daily creep into history. An historical novelist may be justified in venturing upon such ground, but hardly an historical biographer.

So, again, we have an account of the participation of Hatfield, bishop of Durham, in the battle of Nevel's cross, in 1346, at which David of Scotland was taken prisoner, and of his subsequently joining king Edward's camp before Calais, at the surrender of which he was present; and this, not because we know that any De Wessyngton was with him, but because one might have been.

Now all this would have afforded excellent matter for an article in our magazine, and accordingly we have helped ourselves without ceremony; but to meet it in the forefront of a biography of Washington-and that, too, by one on whose unfailing good taste, amid prevailing fripperies and affectations, we are accustomed to rely with so much satisfaction and security-affects us a little disagreeably. It calls to mind the remark of an acute though rather saturnine English critic, who speaks of Mr. Irving as at the head of a school of writers, of whom the distinguishing feature is the making the most of a subject. That is a talent by no means to be despised, and very useful on fitting occasions. Who does not feel a certain admiration of Braddock's two cooks, commemorated by Mr. Irving, "who could make an excellent ragout out of a pair of boots, had they but materials to toss them up with?" But then, this is a skill only to be exercised in times of scarcity. We can dispense with the boots when meat is plenty. There are ample materials for a biography of Washington, without disturbing the mouldering records of the county palatine of Durham. As to those preux chevaliers, the lords of the manor of Wessyngton,

"Their good swords are rust,

Their bodies are dust,

And their souls are with the saints, we trust"

-all, a long time ago; and it does not appear to us to have been at all necessary to raise the one or to

have called down the other, for the only practical purpose to which this resurrection or invocation is put, namely, to explain [see p. 158] by means of the "old chivalrous spirit of the De Wessyngtons'," that "passion for arms" which made Washington, in spite of the remonstrances of his mother, anxious to join in Braddock's expedition. In Washington's younger days, the pursuit of arins was still, in a certain sense, regarded as the only one fit for a gentleman; and young men who have, as he says he had, the best constitution in the world, strengthened and hardened, too, by such a course of life as he had led, are apt, when brought within the sound of drum and fife, to feel some touches of martial ardor, even though not descended from or related to any old feudal family.

The De Wessyngtons at last disposed of, we come next to the Washingtons of Sulgrave, in Northamptonshire, and to Sir Henry Washington (nephew of our Washington's grandfather), who took arms for Charles I., and whose letter (refusing to surrender, except by express orders from the captive king, the town of Worcester, where he commanded,) is given at length by Mr. Irving. Of these respectable cavaliers we have only to say, that whatever might have been the course of the Washingtons of Sulgrave, had the Washington of Mount Vernon happened to have lived in the time of the English civil wars, he certainly would have taken sides with the Parlialiament; and that the theory of hereditary tendencies would, in this case, have been a good deal better substantiated had the English Washingtons happened to have been Roundheads.

Washington was descended from an ancient English gentleman's family. Those who maintain that blood and virtue go together are entitled to that fact. Nor is it fair, in our opinion, to attempt to strip them of it, by setting up, either for the De Wessyngtons or the English Washingtons, any special claim of personal virtue or merit. There is no other basis on which to rest such a claim, except the fact that they were for centuries lords of the manor of Wessyington, and afterwards of other manors. But to base a claim of hereditary virtue" and " "enduring worth" on that foundation alone, would be to assume, that every man who

gets or keeps a manor, even with the law of entail to help him, must be a man of merit-a sufficiently common notion, no doubt, but one which Mr. Irving does not mean to be understood as subscribing to. To sum up the matter in a word-the name of Washington first became illustrious in America. The old English Washingtons may, doubtless, derive a certain illumination from the glory of their American descendant. He shines with a light of his own, to which they can add nothing.

Before ending his first chapter, Mr. Irving, getting fairly out of the county palatine of Durham, and the loyal city of Worcester, lands us happily in the northern neck of Virginia, and in reaching his second chapter, which gives an account of Washington's boyhood—is it not a little odd that, with all his precision of dates about the De Wessyngtons, he forgets to tell the year in which our Washington was born?-we find ourselves much more at home. Still it is not yet quite Washington Irving, or at least it is Washington Irving on his good behavior, and in his dress-coat, going through the common place biographical formulary of showing how, given a mere shapeless piece of clay, to wit: the boy George-the hereditary virtues of the De Wessyngtons being for this occasion kept out of sight-that boy, by the judicious skill of parents and tutors, is moulded into Washington the man. Doubtless the boy George, good and dutiful as he was, listened with all proper reverence and respect to his mother, reading out of Sir Matthew Hale's Contemplations, Moral and Divine. Perhaps, as he was a sober and serious minded youth, though not contemplative, Sir Matthew found in him a sympathetic listener; but that those readings had a great influence in forming his character, is not by any means so certain. It has been well observed by Gibbon, that "the power of instruction is seldom of much efficacy, except in those happy dispositions where it is superfluous." Washington, we apprehend, would have been no less Washington, had Sir Matthew Hale never put his Contemplations upon paper. Our readers will see that we are jealous of Washington, as a purely American production, perhaps a little over jealous; it would not be wonderful, considering what an antipathy to foreigners and foreign influence pervades, just now, our American atmosphere:

but we are not going to yield to Sir Matthew Hale's sermonizings an influence which we have denied to the blood of the De Wessyngtons.

In Mr. Irving's third chapter, we have the boy George, first surveying on the banks of the Shenandoah, and then, at sixteen, in love. His foot upon his native heather, McGregor is himself again: there is no mistaking Washington Irving here, nor in the next chapter, which takes us back again to the Shenandoah, and to Greenway Court, the seat of Lord Fairfax, among the mountains.

Though we do not believe that Washingtons spring up out of the transmitted virtues of feudal blood, still less that they are to be manufactured to order, by any kind of educational contrivances, yet it is impossible to deny the very powerful influence which circumstances exert, over the development even of the strongest natures, and most original minds. If nature was kind to Washington, in the gifts of body, mind and temper, with which she sent him into the world, fortune did not favor him less in the accidents of his surroundings; nor is it by any conjunction less fortunate than this-good seed in good ground-that the rarest of nature's products, a great and good man, comes to perfection. It is in fully bringing out, as he does in a most admirable manner, the advantages which Washington enjoyed, in this respect, that Mr. Irving has left all others of Washington's biographers, and of those who have undertaken to illustrate his career, very far out of sight. We profess to some acquaintance with this subject, having had occasion to consider it carefully; yet, we are free to say, that Mr. Irving, by his extremely skillful method of handling it, has given a new and fresh distinctness to our ideas in relation to it. Washington enjoyed-as Mr. Irving has shown, by tracing out, from materials furnished by himself, little sketches of his daily life and occupations-all the advantages of a backwoods education joined to those of being brought up in highly cultivated and polished society; while, at the same time, he escaped the very serious disadvantages which, though of very different sorts, equally attend an exclusive training, either in log-cabins or in drawing-rooms. Scarcely had he touched upon manhood, when he entered into the public service, in which he continued

in one shape or other for the rest of his life. We certainly never were so strongly impressed, as in reading Mr. Irving's book, with the strength of his claim to be appointed Commander-in-Chief of the American armies, with the stand which he occupied when called upon to accept that trying and difficult office, and with the completeness of the training which he had gone through to prepare himself for it. That training commenced, so far as employment in a public capacity was concerned, with his appointment by Dinwiddie to visit the French posts at Venango, and above, on the upper waters of the Alleghany river, the northern branch of the Ohio. This journey, which most of Washington's biographers dispatch in a paragraph, furnishes Mr. Irving with the materials for a delightful chapter, exhibiting Washington, in this his first public service, the same man he always was afterwards, called to a constant struggle with difficulties, which he met with enduring patience, steady composure, and ready resources. It is in these parts of his book, in his sketches of such men as Gist, Croghan, Van Bonam, and, indeed, in his whole account of Washington's wild-wood journeys and Indian campaigns, that Mr. Irving particularly excels. Washington, as Virginian, whether in his private or in his public capacity, has never been so well presented before.

a

The share which Washington personally bore in the last of the French and Indian wars, of course makes it necessary for Mr. Irving to enter at some length into the general history of that struggle. It was necessary to mention the fall of Quebec; but as Washington had no hand in it, we do not see that his biographer was called upon to devote an entire chapter to that event, nor to go so minutely into its history. More reason would have existed for doing so, had the officers and men concerned in that enterprise been to any considerable extent Americans; but, in fact, the capture of Quebec must be set down as being almost entirely a British affair. There was no great enterprise of the whole war to which the colonists contributed so little, or as to which the mother country so entirely took the laboring oar. The giving such prominence, as many American writers have done, to Wolfe, does not exactly suit our, perhaps, rather ultra-American

tastes. It seems to us a little like carrying into history the precedence which the rules of the British army allowed at that time to British officers. If Wolfe's merits had been overlooked or neglected, the case might be different; but considering how very generally and abundantly they have been acknowledged, we are not prepared to admit his title to occupy an entire chapter in the Life of Washington.

The part of his book in which Mr. Irving gives least satisfaction, is that in which he traces the rise and progress of the revolutionary struggle. This, indeed, is a rather thread-bare topic, not particularly suitable to his peculiar genius, and one, too, which fully brings out the difficulty or rather the impossibility of completely reconciling the demands of biography with those of general history. What is a great deal too much for the one, may still be a great deal too little for the other; and the reader is thus exposed to the double inconvenience of being stuffed and

starved at the same time. Washington's participation in the revolution, beyond that of many other private citizens, hardly commenced till his appointment as Commander-in-Chief of the revolutionary armies. It is true that, as a member of the Virginia House of Burgesses, and as a delegate from Virginia to the Continental Congress, he had given all the weight of his high character to the policy of opposition to the pretensions of the mother country. But he was not one of those men who take the lead in popular assemblies. It was not till he was selected as Commander-inChief, that he began to occupy a place in the foreground of the revolutionary

canvas.

It is with his arrival at Cambridge, to place himself at the head of the forces there, that this first volume ends. The appearance of the two remaining volumes will give us, we hope, a speedy opportunity of resuming the subject, and of giving something more of completeness to our criticism.