l and physical powers at that age is evidenced by the
prostration of Farragut himself, a man of exceptional vigor of body and
of a mental tone which did not increase his burdens by an imaginative
exaggeration of difficulties. He never committed the error, against
which Napoleon cautioned his generals, "_de se faire un tableau_." On
the other hand, the study of his operations shows that, while always
sanguine and ready to take great risks for the sake of accomplishing a
great result, he had a clear appreciation of the conditions necessary to
success and did not confound the impracticable with the merely
hazardous. Of this, his reluctance to ascend the Mississippi in 1862,
and his insistence in 1864 upon the necessity of ironclads, despite his
instinctive dislike to that class of vessel, before undertaking the
entrance to Mobile Bay, are conspicuous illustrations; and must be
carefully kept in view by any one desirous of adequately appreciating
his military character.

As in the case of Nelson, there is a disposition to attribute Farragut's
successes simply to dash--to going straight at the enemy regardless of
method and of consequences. In the case of the great British admiral the
tendency of this view, which has been reproduced in successive
biographies down to the latest, is to sink one of the first of naval
commanders beneath the level of the pugilist, who in his fighting does
not disdain science, to that of the game-cock; and it is doubtless to be
attributed to the emphasis he himself laid upon that direct, rapid, and
vigorous action without which no military operations, however wisely
planned, can succeed. In the want of this, rather than of great
professional acquirements, will be most frequently found the difference
between the successful and the unsuccessful general; and consequently
Nelson, who had seen so much of failure arising from slowness and
over-caution, placed, and rightly placed, more stress upon vigor and
rapidity, in which most are found deficient, than upon the methods which
many understand, however ill they may apply them. Like the distinguished
Frenchman, Suffren, who is said to have stigmatized tactics as "the veil
of timidity," yet illustrated in his headlong dashes the leading
principles of all sound tactics, Nelson carefully planned the chief
outlines of operations, in the execution of which he manifested the
extremes of daring and of unyielding firmness. There was in him no
failure to comprehe