All the hearers and tellers of news abused the general who furnished them with so little news to hear and to tell.
For men of that sort are so greedy after excitement that they far more readily forgive a commander who loses a battle than a commander who declines one.

The politicians, who delivered their oracles from the thickest cloud of tobacco smoke at Garroway's, confidently asked, without knowing any thing, either of war in general, or of Irish war in particular, why Schomberg did not fight.

They could not venture to say that he did not understand his calling.

No doubt he had been an excellent officer: but he was very old.

He seemed to bear his years well: but his faculties were not what they had been: his memory was failing; and it was well known that he sometimes forgot in the afternoon what he had done in the morning.