to the youngest and least prominent member of the friendly group.  Among these able assistants of the commander-in-chief were Colonel Marshall, of Maryland, a gentleman of distinguished intellect; Colonel Peyton, who had entered the battle of Manassas as a private in the ranks, but, on the evening of that day, for courage and efficiency, occupied the place of a commissioned officer on Beauregard’s staff; and others whose names were comparatively unknown to the army, but whose part in the conduct of affairs, under direction of Lee, was most important.

With the gentlemen of his staff General Lee lived on terms of the most kindly regard.  He was a strict disciplinarian, and abhorred the theory that a commissioned officer, from considerations of rank, should hold himself above the private soldiers; but there was certainly no fault of this description to be found at army headquarters, and the general and his staff worked together in harmonious cooeperation.  The respect felt for him by gentlemen who saw him at all hours, and under none of the guise of ceremony, was probably greater than that experienced by the community who looked upon him from a distance.  That distant perspective, hiding little weaknesses, and revealing only the great proportions of a human being, is said to be essential generally to the heroic sublime.  No man, it has been said, can be great to those always near him; but in the case of General Lee this was far from being the fact.  He seemed greater and nobler, day by day, as he was better and more intimately known; and upon this point we shall quote the words of the brave John B. Gordon, one of his most trusted lieutenants: 

“It has been my fortune in life,” says General Gordon, “from circumstances, to have come in contact with some whom the world pronounced great—­some of the earth’s celebrated and distinguished; but I declare it here to-day, that of any mortal man whom it has ever been my privilege to approach, he was the greatest; and I assert here, that, grand as might be your conception of the man before, he arose in incomparable majesty on more familiar acquaintance.  This can be affirmed of few men who have ever lived or died, and of no other man whom it has ever been my fortune to approach.  Like Niagara, the more you gazed, the more its grandeur grew upon you, the more its majesty expanded and filled your spirit with a full satisfaction that left a perfect delight without the slightest feeling of oppression.  Grandly majestic and dignified in all his deportment, he was genial as the sunlight of this beautiful day; and not a ray of that cordial social intercourse but brought warmth to the heart as it did light to the understanding.”