onths,--the martial skill,
courage, and caution, with which our movement was ultimately
made,--and at last the shock with which we were brought
suddenly up against nothing at all!"

It is in dealing with ponderous and awful blunders like this that the
satiric power of the writer finds its favorite field of action.

It is not strange that, in those excited times of bitterness and strife,
certain genuine but shallow souls should have counted it little short of
treason to extract anything like fun from an episode which for us, in
the day of it, was full of very solemn mortification. In this sketch, as
indeed all through his works, it is in the delineation of individual
character--in the analysis of motives--that Hawthorne's peculiar and
amazing power is especially manifest, intermingled withal with a certain
droll self-distrust and deprecation of adverse criticism, to which he
has here given expression in a series of foot-notes, ostensibly from the
editor's pen, but written in fact by the author himself.

The mixture of candor and apologetic self-disapproval in these addenda
has a sufficiently odd effect, intermingled as it is with the utmost
freedom of comment and criticism.

Prominent generals, cabinet ministers, and even the President himself,
are dealt with in a vein of satiric candor, but with a pervasive spirit
of good-nature evident enough and of sufficient breadth to disarm even
official sensitiveness of anything like rancor.

Whatever personal descriptions the author may have meditated, or
accomplished and afterward suppressed, the only full-length portrait he
has given us is that of McClellan, of all the deeper interest and value
now that both these famous Americans are numbered with the dead.

His impressions of President Lincoln seemed colored with a trace of
prejudice, which, however unjust and unfortunate it may appear to us
now, was really only the inevitable consequence of the wide intellectual
gulf that yawned between those two men, both of positive character, and
with tastes and sympathies the most radically opposite. But despite this
unavoidable repulsion, Hawthorne's keen, resistless insight did not fail
to penetrate the wonderful purity and simplicity of Lincoln's character.
In a final word he does him ample justice:--

"He is evidently a man of keen faculties, and, what is still
more to the purpose, of powerful character.

"As to his integrity, the people have tha