a commander should know, and which such commanders as Napoleon and Wellington did know well, he was so entirely ignorant, that he might have been raised to the head of an army of United States Volunteers amid universal applause.  He was vicious to an extent that surprised even the fastest men of that vicious time,—­a gambler, a drunkard, and a loose liver every way, indulging in vices that are held by mild moralists to be excusable in youth who are employed in sowing wild oats, but which are universally admitted to be disgusting in those upon whom age has laid its withering hand.  Yet this vicious and ignorant old man had more to do with bringing about the fall of Napoleon than all the generals and statesmen of the Allies combined.  He had energy, which is the most valuable of all qualities in a military leader; and he hated Napoleon as heartily as he hated Satan, and a great deal more heartily than he hated sin.  Mr. Dickens tells us that the vigorous tenacity of love is always much stronger than hate, and perhaps he is right, so far as concerns private life; but in public life hate is by far the stronger passion.  But for Bluecher’s hatred of Napoleon the campaign of 1813 would have terminated in favor of the Emperor, that of 1814 never would have been undertaken, and that of 1815, if ever attempted, would have had a far different issue.  The old German disregarded all orders and suggestions, and set all military and political principles at defiance, in his ardor to accomplish the one purpose which he had in view; and as that purpose was accomplished, he has taken his place in history as one of the greatest of soldiers.  Napoleon himself is not more secure of immortality.  He was greatly favored by circumstances, but he is a wise man who knows how to profit from circumstances.  Take Bluecher out of the wars of 1813-15, and there is little left in them on the side of the Allies that is calculated to command admiration.  Next to Bluecher stands his celebrated chief of the staff, General Count Gneisenau, who was the brains of the Army of Silesia, Bluecher being its head.  When Bluecher was made an ll.D. at Oxford, he facetiously remarked, “If I am a doctor, here is my pill-maker,” placing his hand on Gneisenau’s head,—­which was a frank acknowledgment that few men would have been able to make.  Gneisenau was fifty-three when he became associated with Bluecher, and he was fifty-five when he acted with him in 1815.  In 1831 he was appointed to an important command, being then seventy-one.  The celebrated Scharnhorst, Gneisenau’s predecessor, and to whom the Prussians owed so much, was in his fifty-seventh year when he died of the wounds he had received at the Battle of Luetzen.