Sherman may have been at one time crazy, but his madness, like Hamlet's, certainly had marvelous method in it. Such lunatics as he have existed in all ages, and have, when as successful as himself, been designated by the distinctive title of "genius," in contradistinction to men of medium abilities. Not only Shakspeare, but Dryden, seems to have encountered such madness as Sherman's, and to have appreciated the truth that "Great wits are sure to madness near allied, And thin partitions do their bounds divide." Doubtless the same author had such a genius or madman as Sherman in his mind when he described one of his characters as "A fiery soul, which, working out its way, Fretted the pigmy body to decay." The peculiar formation of Sherman's head shows his great development of brain. His forehead is broad, high, and full, while the lower half of his face and head are of very diminutive proportions. In a person of less physical strength and vitality, this great preponderance of the mental over the physical powers would have produced perhaps actual lunacy. The head of Sherman is of the shape peculiar to lunatics predisposed to fanciful conceptions. There is too much brain, and in Sherman it is balanced and regulated only by his great physical development. Sherman's brain, combined with bad health, would have produced lunacy; his brain and sinewy strength combined produced his peculiar mental and physical nervousness. Had he been a sedentary student instead of an active soldier, the last line of Dryden's poem might also have applied to him, and we should know of him only as an "o'er informed tenement of clay."[1] When this report of his lunacy was first circulated, Sherman was much chagrined at it, and often referred to it in bitter terms. Time and success have enabled him to frown it down, and justified him in laughing at it. He once laughingly referred to this report about himself, and the rumor which simultaneously prevailed regarding Grant's drunkenness during the battle of Shiloh as illustrative of the friendship existing between them. "You see," he said to a gentleman, "Grant stood by me when I was crazy, and I stood by him when he was drunk." During the siege of Corinth he commanded the right wing of Thomas's corps, while T. W. Sherman, of Port Royal memory, commanded the left. The latter was very unpopular with his division on account of a painfully nervous manner and fretful disposition, and the officers of the command discussed him critically with great freedom, many condemning his manner as offensive. One day General W. T. Sherman was visiting General Steedman--then a brigade commander in T. W. Sherman's division--and the latter's name was brought up, Steedman giving a very ludicrous account of Sherman's conduct. "Oh!" said William Tecumseh, "this is the crazy Sherman, is it?"