Mourn, for to us he seems the last, Remembering all his greatness in the past, No more in soldier fashion will he greet With lifted hand the gazer in the street. O friends, our chief state-oracle is mute: Mourn for the man of long-enduring blood, The statesman-warrior, moderate, resolute, Whole in himself, a common good. Mourn for the man of amplest influence, Yet clearest of ambitious crimes, Our greatest yet with least pretence, Great in council and great in war, Foremost captain of his time, Rich in sowing common-sense, And, as the greatest only are, In his simplicity sublime. O good grey head, which all men knew, O voice from which their omens all men drew, O iron nerve to true occasion true, O fall’n at length that tower of strength Which stood four-square to all the winds that blew. Such was he whom we deplore. The long self-sacrifice of life is o’er. The great World-victor’s victor will be seen no more.” [Illustration: THE WELLINGTON MONUMENT IN ST. PAUL’S CATHEDRAL, COMPLETED IN 1878. (_By Alfred Stevens._)] Though much has been written about the career of the Duke of Wellington, a brief review of his character may not be amiss here. “His striking characteristic was his judgment,” writes Mr. Spencer Walpole. “He had no doubt in addition capacity and courage. He could not have fought Salamanca without the one, and he would not have held Waterloo without the other. But in capacity he was not, possibly, superior to Moore; in courage he was not superior to Gough. He was a great general, not because he had a great intellect, but because he made fewer mistakes than other men.”[62] His success in war was as conspicuous as his failure in politics, and for the simplest of reasons. He was the only great soldier of his time who understood that to triumph in battle it is necessary to have the most exact and minute knowledge of the mechanism of an army, to know as thoroughly how a soldier’s knapsack should be buckled, as how a mighty campaign should be planned. In this consisted his superiority over Napoleon I., who concentrated his mind on the grand scheme of a battle or a campaign, leaving to his subordinates the task of carrying it out in detail. All Napoleon’s subordinates could do the work of subordinates better than their Imperial master. Not one of Wellington’s subordinates, from the Marquis of Anglesey himself down to the humblest private, could do his individual work better than the Duke could do it for him. It was this easy mastery in handling all the machinery of war that enabled him to readjust his arrangements so much more quickly than his opponents could, when any part of a carefully-planned scheme miscarried. But just because he did not possess the same minute and exact knowledge of the political organism, he constantly fell into grievous errors in statesmanship. Starting with