British Grenadiers--do you
take account that these items go to make up the amount of the triumph you
admire, and form part of the duties of the heroes you fondle? Our chief,
whom England and all Europe, saving only the Frenchmen, worshipped almost,
had this of the godlike in him, that he was impassible before victory,
before danger, before defeat. Before the greatest obstacle or the most
trivial ceremony; before a hundred thousand men drawn in battalia, or a
peasant slaughtered at the door of his burning hovel; before a carouse of
drunken German lords, or a monarch's court, or a cottage-table, where his
plans were laid, or an enemy's battery, vomiting flame and death, and
strewing corpses round about him;--he was always cold, calm, resolute, like
fate. He performed a treason or a court-bow, he told a falsehood as black
as Styx, as easily as he paid a compliment or spoke about the weather. He
took a mistress, and left her; he betrayed his benefactor, and supported
him, or would have murdered him, with the same calmness always, and having
no more remorse than Clotho when she weaves the thread, or Lachesis when
she cuts it. In the hour of battle I have heard the Prince of Savoy's
officers say, the prince became possessed with a sort of warlike fury; his
eyes lighted up; he rushed hither and thither, raging; he 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 the
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 of
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 s