His personal intercourse with those about him was so kindly, and his bearing so modest, that his dispatches, proclamations, and correspondence are a psychological study, more puzzling to those who knew him well than to strangers.

Their turgid rhetoric and exaggerated pretence did not seem natural to him.

In them he seemed to be composing for stage effect something to be spoken in character by a quite different person from the sensible and genial man we knew in daily life and conversation.

The career of the great Napoleon had been the study and the absorbing admiration of young American soldiers, and it was perhaps not strange that when real war came they should copy his bulletins and even his personal bearing.

It was, for the moment, the bent of the people to be pleased with McClellan's rendering of the role; they dubbed him the young Napoleon, and the photographers got him to stand with folded arms, in the historic pose.