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 50 CONFEDERATE PORTRAITS

Horace, horribly, but still Horace : Erant fortes ante Agamemnona.

Yet I do not gather that he was much of a student. He preferred to live poems rather than read them. The spirit of romance, the instinct of the picturesque, was born in him and would out anywhere and everywhere. Life was a perpetual play, with ever shifting scenes, and gay lime- light, and hurrying incident, and passionate climax. Again and again he reminds me of a boy playing sol- diers. His ambition, his love of glory, was of this order, not a bit the ardent, devouring, frowning, far-sighted passion of Jackson, but a jovial sense of pleasant things that can be touched and heard and tasted here, to-day. He had a childlike, simple vanity w^hich all his biogra- phers smile at, liked parade, display, and pomp and gor- geousness, utterly differing in this from Jackson, who was too proud, or Lee, who was too lofty. Stuart rode fine horses, never was seen on an inferior animal. ^^ He wore fine clothes, all that his position justified, perhaps a little more. Here is Fitz Lee's picture of him : " His strong figure, his big brown beard, his piercing, laughing blue eye, the drooping hat and black feather, the * fighting jacket' as he termed it, the tall cavalry boots, forming And Cooke is even more particular : " His fighting jacket shone with dazzling buttons and was covered with gold braid ; his hat was looped up with a golden star, and decorated with a black ostrich .plume ; his fine buff

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