enerals? And it
will not do to say, that the young generals were victorious merely in
virtue of their superiority in courage, energy, and dash; for they
evinced a no less decisive superiority in commonsense and
judgment,--that is, in instantaneous command of all their resources in
the moment of peril, in quickness to detect the enemy's weak points,
and, above all, in resolute sagacity to send the full strength of the
arm to second at once the piercing glance of the eye. The old generals,
to be sure, boasted professional experience, but, having ossified their
experience into pedantic maxims, they had less professional skill. After
their armies had been ignominiously routed by the harebrained young
fellows opposed to them, they could easily prove, that, by the rules of
war, they had been most improperly beaten; but their young opponents,
whose eager minds had transmuted the rules of war into instincts of
intelligence, were indifferent to the scandal of violating the etiquette
of fighting, provided thereby they gained the object of fighting. They
had, in fact, the quality which the old generals absurdly claimed,
namely, practical sagacity, or, the Yankee phrased it, "the knack of
hitting it about right the first time."

We cannot, of course, leave the subject of young military commanders
without a reference to Alexander of Macedon, in many respects the
greatest young man that ever, as with the fury of the untamable forces
of Nature, broke into history. But even in the "Macedonian madman," as
he is called, it will be found that fury obeyed sagacity. A colossal
soul, in whom barbaric passions urged gigantic powers to the
accomplishment of insatiable desires, he seems, on the first view, to be
given over to the wildest ecstasies of imaginative pride; but we are
soon dazzled and confounded by the irresistible energy, the cool, clear,
fertile, forecasting intelligence, with which he pursues and realizes
his vast designs of glory and dominion. Strong and arrogant as the
fabled Achilles, with a military genius which allies him to Caesar and
Napoleon, he was tortured by aspirations more devouring than theirs;
for, exalted in his own conception above humanity by his constant
success in performing what other men declared impossible, he aimed to
conquer the world,--not merely to be obeyed as its ruler, but worshipped
as its god. But this self-deified genius, who could find nothing on our
planet capable of withstanding his power, was