Yet some few of them did not lack in ability, or the industry, energy, and courage which creates opportunity and wins renown. One of those whom circumstances robbed of his just renown, and who is now generally looked upon as one of the greatest failures of the war, was to my mind one of our ablest soldiers, and, as a tactician, was the equal of Grant or Thomas, or any of their subordinates. General Don Carlos Buell was a perfect soldier--perfect in manner, bearing, coolness, courage, energy--physically and mentally a perfect soldier--but he failed. If he had a fault, it resulted from education, and from this fault came this failure. "A little learning is a dangerous thing," as Pope, Bulwer Lytton, and every other person who has attempted to dispense knowledge second-handed has discovered to his sorrow; but there is also such a thing as drinking too deep of the "Pierian Spring." To be a valedictorian is quite often to be an unfortunate; and more signal failures have emanated from the first section (Engineer) graduates of West Point, and the valedictorians of Yale and Hartford, than from less brilliant, less studious, but more practically educated classes of the same institutions. Not one of the valedictorians of West Point, from the time at which class-rank was first established--1820, I believe--has ever made a great success in practical life, and few of them have ever been famous outside of the army. They are learned and able undoubtedly, but they lack in practicability, and, when they come to wrestle with the world, find themselves ill adapted to the struggle. The Engineer Corps of the army into which the higher graduates of the Academy are placed has given us fewer successful soldiers than the Infantry, which is considered the lowest arm of the service. All of the engineers have, as generals, been visibly affected in their administration, strategy, and tactics by their education, and have preferred to depend more upon mud walls than living phalanges, and their strategic marches have been more correct in mathematical calculations than successful in execution. Benham, Stevens, Franklin, W. H. C. Whiting, McPherson, McClellan, Lee, and dozens of others I could name, have in the late war proven this to be true; and Quincy A. Gilmore has proved about the only exception to the rule, doubtless from the fact that after his graduation he left the Engineer Corps for the Artillery.