"The higher Virginians seem to venerate themselves as men! I am persuaded there was not one in that company who would have felt embarrassed at being admitted to the presence and conversation of the greatest monarch on earth. There is a compound of virtue and vice in every human character. No man was ever faultless; but whatever may be advanced against Virginians, their good qualities will ever outweigh their defects; and when the effervescence of youth has abated, when reason reasserts her empire, there is no man on earth who discovers more exalted sentiments, more contempt of baseness, more love of justice, more sensibility of feeling, than a Virginian.... I found at the taverns every luxury that money can purchase; the richest viands covered the table, and ice cooled the Madeira that had been thrice across the ocean. About eight miles away was _Powheek_ (Pohick) church--a name it claims from a run that flows near its walls. Hither I rode on Sundays and joined the congregation of Parson Weems" [our friend of the hatchet and cherry tree!] "a minister of the Episcopal persuasion, who was cheerful in his mien that he might win men to religion. A Virginian church-yard on a Sunday, resembles rather a race-course than a sepulchral ground. The ladies come to it in coaches, and the men, after dismounting from their horses, make them fast to the trees. The steeples to Virginia churches were designed not for utility but ornament; for the bell is always suspended to a tree a few yards from the church. I was confounded on first entering the church-yard at Powheek to hear 'Steed threaten steed with high and boastful neigh,' nor was I less stunned with the rattling of wheels, the cracking of whips, and the vociferations of the gentlemen to the negroes who accompanied them. One half the congregation was composed of white people, the other of negroes, and Parson Weems preached the great doctrines of salvation as one who had experienced their power." The Welsh tutor, Davis, and the American tutor and patriot, Fithian, wrote thus of the Virginians of Mary Washington's day, as they saw and knew them. Their horizon was limited to a few representative families in one or two neighborhoods. But a great and good man of the present generation--wise, truthful, candid--has thus recorded his opinion of the Virginians of that period. Says John Fiske: "On the whole it was a noble type of rural gentry that the Old Dominion had to show. Manly simplicity, love of home and family, breezy activity, disinterested public spirit, thorough wholesomeness and integrity,--such were the features of the society whose consummate flower was George Washington."