“On our return to the city we had reached that street--I forget its name--crossing which you find yourself out of Maryland and in the District of Columbia. Wondering at this visible boundary that made certain laws and regulations apply to one side of a street that did not reach the other, I lost the conversation, till I found it consisted of a discursive review of General McClellan’s character, in which I was directly appealed to to know if we had not at one time considered him the second Napoleon in California. “I hastened to say that I had found, in travelling in the New England States, more fervent admirers of the Unready than I had ever known to expend speculative enthusiasm upon him among us. “‘So pleasant and scholarly a gentleman can never fail to secure personal friends,’ said the President. ‘In fact,’ he continued, kindly, ‘“Even his failings lean to virtue’s side.” A keen sense of genius in another, and a reverence for it that forced expression, was out of place at Seven Oaks, as beautiful things sometimes will be. He was lost in admiration of General Lee, and filled with that feeling, forebore to conquer him. The quality that would prove noble generosity in a historian, does not fit the soldier. Another instance of the necessity for my suggestion being carried into effect,’ he added, smiling. “When in New York a few months afterwards, I heard the regular dinner-table conversation turn on the ‘Nero who cracked jokes while Rome was burning,’ and the hundred and one wicked things the McClellanites said of Mr. Lincoln, I recalled the gentle verdict I had heard, and acknowledged how bitterly a noble Christian gentleman may be belied. It was after McClellan’s speech at West Point, and his admirers were wild with enthusiasm over the learning and classic taste it displayed. The word ‘scholarly’ rang from mouth to mouth in characterizing it,--the very word Mr. Lincoln had used months before in finding a merciful excuse for his inefficiency.