COLONEL TAYLOR AND GENERAL LEE

    Forth from its scabbard all in vain
      Bright flashed the sword of Lee;
    ’Tis shrouded now in its sheath again,
    It sleeps the sleep of our noble slain,
    Defeated, yet without a stain,
      Proudly and peacefully.

    —­ABRAM J. RYAN.

Though I had often heard, before going into the South, of the devotion of that section to the memory of General Robert E. Lee, I never fully realized the extent of that devotion until I began to become a little bit acquainted with Virginia.  I remember being struck, while in Norfolk, with the fact that portraits of General Lee were to be seen in many offices and homes, much as one might expect, at the present time, to find portraits of Joffre and Nivelle in the homes of France, or of Haig in the homes of Britain.  It is not enough to say that the memory of Lee is to the South like that of Napoleon I to France, for it is more.  The feeling of France for Napoleon is one of admiration, of delight in a national military genius, of hero-worship, but there is not intermingled with it the quality of pure affection which fully justifies the use of the word love, in characterizing the feeling of the South for its great military leader—­the man of whom Lord Wolseley said:  “He was a being apart and superior to all others in every way; a man with whom none I ever knew, and very few of whom I ever read are worthy to be compared; a man who was cast in a grander mould and made of finer metal than all other men.”

Nor is this love surprising, for whereas Napoleon was a self-seeking man, and one whose personal character was not altogether admirable in other respects, and whereas he could hardly be said to typify France’s ideal of everything a gentleman should be, Lee sought nothing for himself, was a man of great nobility of character, and was in perfection a Virginia gentleman.  At the end, moreover, where Napoleon’s defeat was that of an aspirant to conquest, glory and empire, Lee’s defeat was that of a cause, and the cause was regarded in the entire South as almost holy, so that, in defeat, the South felt itself martyred, and came to look upon its great general with a love and veneration unequaled in history, and much more resembling the feeling of France for the canonized Joan of Arc, than for the ambitious Corsican.

When, therefore, my companion and I heard, while in Norfolk, that Colonel Walter H. Taylor, president of the Marine Bank of that city, had served through the Civil War on General Lee’s staff, we naturally became very anxious to meet him; and I am glad to say that Colonel Taylor, though at the time indisposed and confined to his home, was so kind as to receive us.