ts of Oxford rides Rupert on the
day we are to describe, and we must still protract our pause a little
longer to speak of him.

Prince Rupert, Prince Robert, or Prince Robber,--for by all these names
was he known,--was the one formidable military leader on the royal side.
He was not a statesman, for he was hardly yet a mature man; he was
not, in the grandest sense, a hero, yet he had no quality that was not
heroic. Chivalrous, brilliant, honest, generous,--neither dissolute, nor
bigoted, nor cruel,--he was still a Royalist for the love of royalty,
and a soldier for the love of war, and in civil strife there can hardly
be a more dangerous character. Through all the blunt periods of his
military or civil proclamations, we see the proud, careless boy,
fighting for fighting sake, and always finding his own side the right
one. He could not have much charity for the most generous opponents; he
certainly had none at all for those who (as he said) printed malicious
and lying pamphlets against him "almost every morning," in which he
found himself saluted as a "nest of perfidious vipers," "a night-flying
dragon prince," "a flapdragon," "a caterpillar," "a spider," and "a
_butterbox_."

He was the King's own nephew,--great-grandson of William the Silent, and
son of that Elizabeth Stuart from whom all the modern royal family of
England descends. His sister was the renowned Princess Palatine, the
one favorite pupil of Descartes, and the chosen friend of Leibnitz,
Malebranche, and William Penn. From early childhood he was trained to
war; we find him at fourteen pronounced by his tutors fit to command
an army,--at fifteen, bearing away the palm in one of the last of the
tournaments,--at sixteen, fighting beside the young Turenne in the Low
Countries,--at nineteen, heading the advanced guard in the army of the
Prince of Orange,--and at twenty-three, appearing in England, the day
before the Royal Standard was reared, and the day after the King lost
Coventry, because Wilmot, not Rupert, was commander of the horse.
This training made him a general,--not, as many have supposed, a mere
cavalry-captain;--he was one of the few men who have shown great
military powers on both land and sea; he was a man of energy unbounded,
industry inexhaustible, and the most comprehensive and systematic
forethought. It was not merely, that, as Warwick said, "he put that
spirit into the King's army that all men seemed resolved,"--not merely,
that, always cha