His instruments were not invariably the best and sometimes
failed him, but they were always the best he could get, and he knew
their defects and ran the inevitable risks with his eyes open. Such
sure and rapid judgments of men and their capabilities were possible
only to a man of keen perception and accurate observation, neither of
which is characteristic of a slow or common-place mind.
[Footnote 1: _Magazine of American History_, vol. iii., 1879, p. 81.]
[Footnote 2: _Memoir of Rt. Rev. William Meade_, by Philip Slaughter,
D.D., p. 7.]
These qualities were, of course, gifts of nature, improved and
developed by the training of a life of action on a great scale. He had
received, indeed, little teaching except that of experience, and the
world of war and politics had been to him both school and college. His
education had been limited in the extreme, scarcely going beyond the
most rudimentary branches except in mathematics, and this is very
apparent in his early letters. He seems always to have written a
handsome hand and to have been good at figures, but his spelling at
the outset was far from perfect, and his style, although vigorous, was
abrupt and rough. He felt this himself, took great pains to correct
his faults in this respect, and succeeded, as he did in most things.
Mr. Sparks has produced a false impression in this matter by smoothing
and amending in very extensive fashion all the earlier letters, so as
to give an appearance of uniformity throughout the correspondence; a
process which not only destroyed much of the vigor and force of the
early writings, but made them somewhat unnatural.
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