His hatred of inactivity, his love of enterprise, his daring courage, his strong and determined resolution, his rapid powers of combination, and that peculiar talent for command which is a gift rather than an acquirement, had made him loved and admired by the soldiery under him, and might have gone far to constitute one of the greatest generals of the age. But by his fellow officers he had never been loved, and by those above him he had constantly been used, but had never been trusted nor liked. In truth, there was a fierce and overbearing spirit in his bosom, a contempt for other men's opinions, and an abhorrence of the ordinary littleness of human nature, which prevented him from seeking or winning the regard of any one, towards whom some peculiar circumstance, or some extraordinary powers, had not excited in his bosom feelings either of tenderness or of respect; and for this reason he had never been loved. Why he had never been trusted was another matter. He had set out in life depending more upon feeling than upon principle as his guide; and though, as he went on, he had framed for his own bosom a sort of code of laws by which he was strictly bound, those laws did not always very well accord with the ordinary code of mankind, and if generally acted upon must have been disastrous to society. Those who disliked him--very often for his superiority to themselves--were glad to find in his failings a specious excuse for undervaluing his better qualities, and thus he had been always thwarted and bitterly disappointed in his progress through life.
Brought up as a soldier from his earliest years, he had ever looked upon strife as his profession, life as one great campaign, the world as a battle-field, mankind as either enemies or fellow soldiers. The great law that he had laid down for himself was, never to measure himself against any but those who were equal to the strife; and he would just as soon have thought of injuring the weak, the innocent, or the defenceless, as he would of murdering the wounded in an hospital. The proud, the haughty, and the strong he took a pleasure in humbling or overthrowing, even when bound to the same cause with himself, and the constant single combats in which he was engaged had raised him up a bad name in the service.