Revolutionary army, in such numbers as night have been expected.
Respectable as the officers generally were, and great as were the
abilities sometimes elicited, the intellect and cultivation of the
country was inadequately represented in them, as a body.

Turning another page, we find the frank of a letter from Henry Laurens,
President of Congress,--him whose destiny it was, like so many noblemen
of old, to pass beneath the Traitor's Gate of the Tower of London,--him
whose chivalrous son sacrificed as brilliant a future as any young
American could have looked forward to, in an obscure skirmish.
Likewise, we have the address of a letter to Messrs. Leroy and Bayard,
in the handwriting of Jefferson; too slender a material to serve as a
talisman for summoning up the writer; a most unsatisfactory fragment,
affecting us like a glimpse of the retreating form of the sage of
Monticello, turning the distant corner of a street. There is a scrap
from Robert Morris, the financier; a letter or two from Judge Jay; and
one from General Lincoln, written, apparently, on the gallop, but
without any of those characteristic sparks that sometimes fly out in a
hurry, when all the leisure in the world would fail to elicit them.
Lincoln was the type of a New England soldier; a man of fair abilities,
not especially of a warlike cast, without much chivalry, but faithful
and bold, and carrying a kind of decency and restraint into the wild and
ruthless business of arms.

From good old Baron Steuben, we find, not a manuscript essay on the
method of arranging a battle, but a commercial draft, in a small, neat
hand, as plain as print, elegant without flourish, except a very
complicated one on the signature. On the whole, the specimen is
sufficiently characteristic, as well of the Baron's soldierlike and
German simplicity, as of the polish of the Great Frederick's aide-de-