nes, where General Joseph Johnston
was disabled, to the morning of the final surrender at Appomattox
Court-House, he was almost invariably victorious in the field. At
Gettysburg only he was defeated in a pitched battle; on the offensive
at the Chickahominy, at Centreville, and at Chancellorsville, on
the defensive at Antietam, Fredericksburg, the Wilderness, and
Spottsylvania, he was still successful. But no success could avail him
any thing from the moment that General Grant brought to bear upon
the Virginian army the inexhaustible population of the North, and,
employing Sherman to cut them off from the rest of the Confederacy,
set himself to work to wear them out by the simple process of
exchanging two lives for one. From that moment the fate of Richmond
and of the South was sealed. When General Lee commenced the campaign
of the Wilderness he had, we believe, about fifty thousand men; his
adversary had thrice that number at hand, and a still larger force in
reserve. When the army of Virginia marched out of Richmond it still
numbered some twenty-six thousand men; after a retreat of six days,
in the face of an overwhelming enemy, with a crushing artillery--a
retreat impeded by constant fighting, and harassed by countless hordes
of cavalry--eight thousand were given up by the capitulation of
Appomattox Court-House. Brilliant as were General Lee's earlier
triumphs, we believe that he gave higher proofs of genius in his last
campaign, and that hardly any of his victories were so honorable to
himself and his army as that six-days' retreat.

"There have, however, been other generals of genius as brilliant, of
courage and endurance hardly less distinguished. How many men have
ever displayed the perfect simplicity of nature, the utter absence
of vanity or affectation, which belongs to the truest and purest
greatness, in triumph or in defeat, as General Lee has done? When
Commander-in-Chief of the Southern armies, he moved from point to
point, as duty required, with less parade than a European general
of division, wearing no sword, attended by no other staff than the
immediate occasion demanded, and chatting with a comrade or a visitor
with a simple courtesy which had in it no shade of condescension.
Only on one occasion does he seem to have, been accoutred with the
slightest regard to military display or personal dignity; and that,
characteristically, was the last occasion on which he wore the
Confederate uniform--the occasio