Lord Cornwallis was fifty-two when he broke the power of Tippoo Saib, and prepared the way for his ultimate overthrow.  Lord Peterborough was forty-seven, and had never before held a command or seen much service, when he set out on that series of extraordinary campaigns which came so near replacing the Austrian house in possession of Spain and the Indies.  Peterborough has been called the last of the knights-errant; but, in fact, no book on knight-errantry contains anything half so wonderful as his deeds in the country of Don Quixote.  Sir Eyre Coote, who had so boldly supported that bold policy which led to the victory of Plassey, nearly a quarter of a century later supported Hastings in the field with almost as much vigor as he had supported Clive in council, and saved British India, when it was assailed by the ablest of all its foes.  His last victories were gained in advanced life, and are ranked with the highest of those actions to which England owes her wonderful Oriental dominion.  Lord Keane was verging upon sixty when he led the British forces into Afghanistan, and took Ghuznee.  Against all her old and middle-aged generals, her kings and princes apart, England could place but very few young commanders of great worth.  Clive’s case was clearly exceptional; and Wolfe owed his victory on the Heights of Abraham as much to Montcalm’s folly as to his own audacity.  The Frenchman should have refused battle, when time and climate would soon have wrought his deliverance and his enemy’s ruin.

It is generally held that the wars which grew out of the French Revolution, and which involved the world in their flames, were chiefly the work of young men, and that their history illustrates the superiority of youth over age in the ancient art of human destruction.  But this belief is not well founded, and, indeed, bears a close resemblance to that other error in connection with the French Revolution, namely, that it proceeded from the advent of new opinions, which obtained ascendency,—­whereas those opinions were older than France, and had more than once been aired in France, and there had struggled for supremacy.  The opinions before the triumph of which the old monarchy went down were much older than that monarchy; but as they had never before been able definitely to influence the nation’s action, it was not strange that they should be considered new, when there was nothing new about them save their application.  Young opinions, as they are supposed to have been, are best championed by young men; and hence it is assumed that the French leaders in the field were youthful heroes, as were the civil leaders in many instances,—­and a very nice mess the latter made of the business they engaged in, doing little that was well in it beyond getting their own heads cut off.  There are some facts that greatly help to sustain the position that France was saved from partition by the exertions of young generals, the new men of the new time.  Hoche, Moreau, Bonaparte, Desaix, Soult, Lannes, Ney,