Sunday, July 13th, 1777. News that our Army has surprised Washington and taken him prisoner. Afraid it is too good to be authentic. His great caution will always prevent him being made a prisoner to our inactive General. Washington is certainly a most surprising man, one of Nature's geniuses, a Heaven-born General, if there is any of that sort. That a Negro-driver should, with a ragged Banditti of undisciplined people, the scum and refuse of all nations on earth, so long keep a British General at bay, nay, even, oblige him, with as fine an army of Veteran Soldiers as ever England had on the American Continent, to retreat--it is astonishing. It is too much. By Heavens, there must be double-dealing somewhere. General Howe, a man brought up to War from his youth, to be puzzled and plagued for two years together, with a Virginia Tobacco planter. O! Britain, how thy Laurels tarnish in the hands of such a Lubber! The life of General Washington will be a most copious subject for some able Biographer to exercise his pen upon. Nature did not make me one of the Biographic order. However, I will make some remarks concerning this great and wonderful man.

(Cresswell was a loyalist in America during the Revolutionary War.)

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.

"These are the times in which a genius would wish to live. It is not in the still calm of life, or the repose of a pacific station, that great characters are formed. The habits of a vigorous mind are formed in contending with difficulties. Great necessities call out great virtues. When a mind is raised, and animated by scenes that engage the heart, then those qualities which would otherwise lay dormant, wake into life and form the character of the hero and the statesman."