And with this view He chose out five of His best captains--My five pickt men, He always called them--and placed those five captains and their thousands under them in the strongholds of the town.

On the margin of this page our versatile author speaks of that step of Emmanuel's in the language of a philosopher, a moralist, and a divine.

'Five graces,' he says, 'pickt out of an abundance of common virtues.' This summing-up sentence stands on his stiff and dry margin.
But in the rich and living flow of the text itself our author goes on writing like the man of genius he is.

With all the warmth and colour and dramatic movement of which this whole book is full, this great writer goes on to set those five choice captains of our salvation before us in a way that we shall never forget.
1.

'The first was that famous captain, the noble Captain Credence.