So long as a general's sword is seemingly invincible, and the uniformity of his success silences even the cavillings of envy,--that most persistent of all the unlovely emotions,--just so long he may safely count on a unanimity of public approval. But let disaster befall, and, justly or otherwise, it matters little which, the voices just now most vociferous for coronation, bellow the loudest for crucifixion! Few of our commanders in the late war had bitterer evidence of this than McClellan. Idolized while victorious, he was vituperated with corresponding violence the instant fortune showed signs of wavering in her fidelity. At this distance from those stirring times we can easily perceive that the idolatry and the abuse were alike unjust and even ridiculous; the same wisdom that pronounces it unsafe to praise a man until death has set the seal to his earthly reputation, deems it no less a folly to bestow adulation or excessive blame on a military commander before the end of his campaigns. To his brief estimate of McClellan's character and qualifications for his post of vast responsibility, our author brought an admirable coolness of judgment, and that wonderful insight into men and motives so seldom at fault. Keenly alive to the ridiculousness of the attack on Manassas, and declaring that "no rebel artillery has played upon us with such overwhelming effect," he was capable, with a fairness sufficiently amazing in any critic of those days, of doing full justice to the general's indubitable ability and patriotism. He closes his sketch of McClellan, by no means the least valuable part of the article we are considering, with this decided expression of opinion: "I shall not give up my faith in his soldiership until he is defeated, nor in his courage and integrity even then." An odd peculiarity of Hawthorne's mind was the incertitude--I use this vile word in lack of a better at the moment--that seemed at times to invest his reasoning powers with a sort of Indian summer haziness. This idiosyncrasy had a striking exemplification when our travellers met "a party of contrabands escaping out of the mysterious depths of Secessia." "They were unlike the specimens of their race whom we are accustomed to see at the North, and, in my judgment, were far more agreeable. "So rudely were they attired,--as if their garb had grown upon them spontaneously,--so picturesquely natural in manners, and wearing such a crust of primeval simplicity (which is quite polished away from the Northern black man), that they seemed a kind of creature by themselves, not altogether human, but perhaps quite as good, and akin to the fauns and rustic deities of olden times. I wonder if I shall excite anybody's wrath by saying this?