name for a man already thirty-four was a sign that the people expected impossible things from him.  Letters to his wife, which have been injudiciously published, show him to us delighting at first in the consideration paid to him by Lincoln and Scott, proudly confident in his own powers, rather elated than otherwise by a sense that the safety of the country rested on him alone.  “I shall carry the thing en grande, and crush the rebels in one campaign.”  He soon had a magnificent army; he may be said to have made it himself.  Before, as he thought, the time had come to use it, he had fallen from favour, and a dead set was being made against him in Washington.  A little later, at the crisis of his great venture, when, as he claimed, the Confederate capital could have been taken, his expedition was recalled.  Then at a moment of deadly peril to the country his services were again called in.  He warded off the danger.  Yet a little while and his services were discarded for ever.  This summary, which is the truth, but not the whole truth, must enlist a certain sympathy for him.  The chief fact of his later life should at once be added.  In 1864, when a Presidential election was approaching and despondency prevailed widely in the North, he was selected as the champion of a great party.  The Democrats adopted a “platform” which expressed neither more nor less than a desire to end the war on any terms.  In accordance with the invariable tradition of party opposition in war time, they chose a war hero as their candidate for the Presidency.  McClellan publicly repudiated their principles, and no doubt he meant it, but he became their candidate—­their master or their servant as it might prove.  That he was Lincoln’s opponent in the election of that year ensured that his merits and his misfortunes would be long remembered, but his action then may suggest to any one the doubtful point in his career all along.

Some estimate of his curious yet by no means uncommon type of character is necessary, if Lincoln’s relations with him are to be understood at all.  The devotion to him shown by his troops proves that he had great titles to confidence, besides, what he also had, a certain faculty of parade, with his handsome charger, his imposing staff and the rest.  He was a great trainer of soldiers, and with some strange lapses, a good organiser.  He was careful for the welfare of his men; and his almost tender carefulness of their lives contrasted afterwards with what appeared the ruthless carelessness of Grant.  Unlike some of his successors, he could never be called an incapable commander.  His great opponent, Lee, who had known him of old, was wont to calculate on his extraordinary want of enterprise, but he spoke of him on the whole in terms of ample respect—­also, by the way, he sympathised with him like a soldier when, as he naturally assumed, he became a victim to scheming politicians; and Lee confided this feeling to the ready