It is for this reason that the large portion of history which relates to war is so much the history of the triumphs of young men. Thus, Scipio was twenty-nine when he gained the Battle of Zana; Charles the Twelfth, nineteen when he gained the Battle of Narva; Condé, twenty-two when he gained the Battle of Rocroi. At thirty-six, Scipio the younger was the conqueror of Carthage; at thirty-six, Cortés was the conqueror of Mexico; at thirty, Charlemagne was master of France and Germany; at thirty-two, Clive had established the British power in India. Hannibal, the greatest of military commanders, was only thirty, when, at Cannæ, he dealt an almost annihilating blow at the republic of Rome; and Napoleon was only twenty-seven, when, on the plains of Italy, he outgeneralled and defeated, one after another, the veteran marshals of Austria. And in respect to the wars which grew out of the French Revolution, what are they but the record of old generals beaten by young generals? And it will not do to say, that the young generals were victorious merely in virtue of their superiority in courage, energy, and dash; for they evinced a no less decisive superiority in commonsense and judgment,--that is, in instantaneous command of all their resources in the moment of peril, in quickness to detect the enemy's weak points, and, above all, in resolute sagacity to send the full strength of the arm to second at once the piercing glance of the eye. The old generals, to be sure, boasted professional experience, but, having ossified their experience into pedantic maxims, they had less professional skill. After their armies had been ignominiously routed by the harebrained young fellows opposed to them, they could easily prove, that, by the rules of war, they had been most improperly beaten; but their young opponents, whose eager minds had transmuted the rules of war into instincts of intelligence, were indifferent to the scandal of violating the etiquette of fighting, provided thereby they gained the object of fighting. They had, in fact, the quality which the old generals absurdly claimed, namely, practical sagacity, or, the Yankee phrased it, "the knack of hitting it about right the first time."