He wrote:
Belvoir.
Honoured Madam: You are so good as to ask what I think of a temporary residence for your son George in England. It is a country for which I myself have no inclination, and the gentlemen you mention are certainly renowned gamblers and rakes, which I should be sorry your son were exposed to, even if his means easily admitted of a residence in England. He is strong and hardy, and as good a master of a horse as any could desire. His education might have been bettered, but what he has is accurate and inclines him to much life out of doors. He is very grave for one of his age, and reserved in his intercourse; not a great talker at any time. His mind appears to me to act slowly, but, on the whole, to reach just conclusions, and he has an ardent wish to see the right of questions—what my friend Mr. Addison was pleased to call “the intellectual conscience.” Method and exactness seem to be natural to George. He is, I suspect, beginning to feel the sap rising, being in the spring of life, and is getting ready to be the prey of your sex, wherefore may the Lord help him, and deliver him from the nets those spiders, called women, will cast for his ruin. I presume him to be truthful because he is exact. I wish I could say that he governs his temper. He is subject to attacks of anger on provocation, and sometimes without just cause; but as he is a reasonable person, time will cure him of this vice of nature, and in fact he is, in my judgment, a man who will go to school all his life and profit thereby.
I hope, madam, that you will find pleasure in what I have written, and will rest assured that I shall continue to interest myself in his fortunes.
Much honoured by your appeal to my judgment, I am, my dear madam, your obedient humble servant,
Fairfax.
To Mrs. Mary Washington.
My nephew Bushrod Washington, in arranging my papers, placed all my Fairfax letters in one packet, and thus it chances that lying next to this one is a letter from Bryan Fairfax, the brother of my older friend, written in 1778 from New York. I am pleased to find it here, and thus to be reminded of the vast changes through which time gives us opportunities. I had been able to stop the Whigs in New York from offensive attacks upon this gentleman, and on this he wrote:
There are times when favours conferred make a greater impression than at others; for, though I have received many, I hope I have not been unmindful of them; yet that, at a time your popularity was at the highest and mine at the lowest, and when it is so common for men’s political resentments to run up so high against those who differ from them in opinion, you should act with your wonted kindness toward me, has affected me more than any favour I have received; and such conduct could not be believed by some in New York, it being above the run of common minds.
When Lord Fairfax died in his ninety-second year, my old comrade, this Bryan Fairfax, became the heir to his title, but I believe never allowed himself the use of it, and, becoming a clergyman of our church, is still thus engaged.