You can no more love and revere the memory of the biographical George Washington than you can an isosceles triangle or a cubic foot of interstellar space. The portrait-painters began it—Gilbert Stuart and the rest of them. They idealized all the humanity out of the poor patriot's face and passed him down to the engravers as a rather sleepy-looking butcher's block. There is not a portrait of Washington extant which a man of taste and knowledge would suffer to hang on the wall of his stable. Then the historians jumped in, raping all the laurels from the brows of the man's great contemporaries and piling them in confusion upon his pate. They made him a god in wisdom, and a giant in arms; whereas, in point of ability and service, he was but little, if at all, superior to any one of a half-dozen of his now over-shadowed but once illustrious co-workers in council and camp, and in no way comparable with Hamilton. He towers above his fellows because he stands upon a pile of books.

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "You can no more love and revere the memory of the biographical George Washington than you can an isosceles triangle or a cubic foot of interstellar space. The portrait-painters began it—Gilbert Stuart and the rest of them. They idealized all the humanity out of the poor patriot's face and passed him down to the engravers as a rather sleepy-looking butcher's block. There is not a portrait of Washington extant which a man of taste and knowledge would suffer to hang on the wall of his stable. Then the historians jumped in, raping all the laurels from the brows of the man's great contemporaries and piling them in confusion upon his pate. They made him a god in wisdom, and a giant in arms; whereas, in point of ability and service, he was but little, if at all, superior to any one of a half-dozen of his now over-shadowed but once illustrious co-workers in council and camp, and in no way comparable with Hamilton. He towers above his fellows because he stands upon a pile of books." in the context of "Ambrose Bierce, "George the Made-over," in Tangential Views (1911)" to mean that wisdom is timeless.