ither,
raging; shrieked curses and encouragement, yelling and harking his
bloody war-dogs on, and himself always at the first of the hunt. Our
duke was as calm at the mouth of a cannon as at the door of a
drawing-room. Perhaps he could not have been the great man he was had
he had a heart either for love or hatred, or pity or fear, or regret
or remorse. He achieved the highest deed or daring, or deepest
calculation of thought, as he performed the very meanest action of
which a man is capable; told a lie or cheated a fond woman or robbed a
poor beggar of a halfpenny, with a like awful serenity, and equal
capacity of the highest and lowest acts of our nature.

His qualities were pretty well known in the army, where there were
parties of all politics, and of plenty of shrewdness and wit; but
there existed such a perfect confidence in him, as the first captain
of the world, and such a faith and admiration in his prodigious genius
and fortune, that the very men whom he notoriously cheated of their
pay, the chiefs whom he used and injured--for he used all men, great
and small, that came near him, as his instruments alike, and took
something of theirs, either some quality or some property: the blood
of a soldier, it might be, or a jeweled hat or a hundred thousand
crowns from the king, or a portion out of a starving sentinel's three
farthings; or when he was young, a kiss from a woman, and the gold
chain off her neck, taking all he could from woman or man, and having,
as I said, this of the god-like in him, that he could see a hero
perish or a sparrow fall with the same amount of sympathy for either.

Not that he had no tears, he could always order up this reserve at the
proper moment to battle; he could draw upon tears or smiles alike, and
whenever need was for using this cheap coin. He would cringe to a
shoeblack, and he would flatter a minister or a monarch; be haughty,
be humble, threaten, repent, weep, grasp your hand, or stab you
whenever he saw occasion--but yet those of the army who knew him best
and had suffered most from him, admired him most of all; and as he
rode along the lines to battle, or galloped up in the nick of time to
a battalion reeling from the enemy's charge or shot, the fainting men
and officers got new courage as they saw the splendid calm of his
face, and felt that his will made them irresistible.

After the great victory of Blenheim, the enthusiasm of the army for
the duke, even of his bitterest