The cherry-tree story has had few rivals in publicity and has probably done more than anything else to implant an instinctive contempt of its hero in the hearts of four generations of readers.

"Why couldn't George Washington lie ?" was the comment of a little boy I knew, "Couldn't he talk ?" Weems pretended to an intimacy at Mount Vernon which it appears he never had.

In "Blackwood's Magazine" John Neal said of the book, "Not one word of which we believe.

It is full of ridiculous exaggerations." And yet neither this criticism nor any other stemmed the outpouring of editions of it which must now number more than seventy.

Weems doubtless thought that he was helping God and doing good to Washington by his offensive and effusive support of rudimentary morals.
Weems had been dead a dozen years when another enemy sprang up.