He then dressed them up in his own peculiar fashion and gave them to the world.

All this, forming of course nine tenths of his book, has passed, despite its success, into oblivion.

The remaining tenth described Washington's boyhood until his fourteenth or fifteenth year, and this, which is the work of the author's imagination, has lived.
Weems, having set himself up as absolutely the only authority as to this period, has been implicitly followed, and has thus come to demand serious consideration.

Until Weems is weighed and disposed of, we cannot even begin an attempt to get at the real Washington.
Weems was not a cold-blooded liar, a mere forger of anecdotes.

He was simply a man destitute of historical sense, training, or morals, ready to take the slenderest fact and work it up for the purposes of the market until it became almost as impossible to reduce it to its original dimensions as it was for the fisherman to get the Afrit back into his jar.