"It was as if General McClellan had thrust his sword into a gigantic enemy, and, beholding him suddenly collapse, had discovered to himself and the world that he had merely punctured an enormously swollen bladder. "There are instances of a similar character in old romances, where great armies are long kept at bay by the arts of the necromancers, who build airy towers and battlements, and muster warriors of terrible aspect, and thus feign a defence of seeming impregnability, until some bolder champion of the besiegers dashes forward to try an encounter with the foremost foeman, and finds him melt away in the death-grapple. With such heroic adventures let the march upon Manassas be hereafter reckoned. "The whole business, though connected with the destinies of a nation, takes inevitably a tinge of the ludicrous. "The vast preparation of men and warlike material,--the majestic patience and docility,--with which the people waited through those weary and dreary months,--the martial skill, courage, and caution, with which our movement was ultimately made,--and at last the shock with which we were brought suddenly up against nothing at all!" It is in dealing with ponderous and awful blunders like this that the satiric power of the writer finds its favorite field of action. It is not strange that, in those excited times of bitterness and strife, certain genuine but shallow souls should have counted it little short of treason to extract anything like fun from an episode which for us, in the day of it, was full of very solemn mortification. In this sketch, as indeed all through his works, it is in the delineation of individual character--in the analysis of motives--that Hawthorne's peculiar and amazing power is especially manifest, intermingled withal with a certain droll self-distrust and deprecation of adverse criticism, to which he has here given expression in a series of foot-notes, ostensibly from the editor's pen, but written in fact by the author himself. The mixture of candor and apologetic self-disapproval in these addenda has a sufficiently odd effect, intermingled as it is with the utmost freedom of comment and criticism. Prominent generals, cabinet ministers, and even the President himself, are dealt with in a vein of satiric candor, but with a pervasive spirit of good-nature evident enough and of sufficient breadth to disarm even official sensitiveness of anything like rancor. Whatever personal descriptions the author may have meditated, or accomplished and afterward suppressed, the only full-length portrait he has given us is that of McClellan, of all the deeper interest and value now that both these famous Americans are numbered with the dead.