WASHINGTON. By Joseph Dillaway Sawyer. (Mac- millan. 2 vols. 84s.)-As
a pictorial record of George Washington's career Mr. Sawyer's massive volumes are to be commended- to those who love the minute details of biography. Nothing that could be illustrated seems to have escaped Mr. Sawyer's attention. He even includes among his fifteen hundred illustrations, large and small, reduced photographs of letters, documents and newspaper articles relating in some way to the great man. We should have preferred a more rigorous selection, but that is a matter of taste. Mr. Sawyer's memoir is frankly uncritical. He does not fail to discuss the legend of the cherry-tree, invented by the egregious Mr. Weems, and gives a photograph of " an alleged descendant " of the tree which George cut down with his little hatchet. Here, again, we could have wished for a more dispassionate estimate of Washington as general and statesman, but the author was concerned only to paint an ideal American and has done so very successfully. In his conventional account of the revolution Mr. Sawyer should not refer to George Grenville, more than once, as Lord Grenville. If there was any Whig commoner whom George III. hated more than another, it was Grenville, who stood no chance of receiving a peerage. The " College of Heraldry" is possibly a misprint.
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