mannerism may have been due to the fact that he was essentially a man of society, as society was then. He had eloped in early life with Lord Derby’s daughter, and, like Charles Fox, was a confirmed gambler. The world of London was his world, and the standard by which he measured things was not the standard of all time. When he went out in 1777 to command the expedition from Canada, he was on the flowing tide of fortune, and the tone of his proclamations gave Walpole cause for sarcastic comment. ‘Have you read General Burgoyne’s rhodomontade, in which he almost promises to cross America in a hop, step, and a jump?’[136] ‘Burgoyne has sent over a manifesto that if he was to over-run ten provinces would appear too pompous.’[136] ‘I heard to-day at Richmond that Julius Caesar Burgonius’s Commentaries are to be published in an Extraordinary Gazette of three-and-twenty pages in folio to-morrow--a counterpart to the _Iliad_ in a nutshell.’[136] All these three passages were written in August, 1777, while Burgoyne’s expedition was proceeding. The writer of them did not like Burgoyne, and did not like the war in which Burgoyne was engaged; but, though Burgoyne lent himself to criticism and lacked the qualities which the time and place demanded, his story is by no means the story either of a bad soldier or of a bad man; it is rather the story of a second-rate man set with inadequate means to solve a problem of first-rate importance. [Sidenote: Burgoyne’s advance against Ticonderoga.] [Sidenote: The American position at Ticonderoga.]