The blunder was gross and palpable; and
yet, with the unreflecting and dull-witted soldier, it did him service
greater than all the subtilties of all the schools could have
accomplished, and a service which subsisted to the end of the war.
Great as Caesar was by the benefit of his original nature, there can--be no
doubt that he, like others, owed something to circumstances; and perhaps,
amongst these which were most favorable to the premature development of
great self-dependence, we must reckon the early death of his father. It
is, or it is not, according to the nature of men, an advantage to be
orphaned at an early age. Perhaps utter orphanage is rarely or never such:
but to lose a father betimes profits a strong mind greatly. To Caesar it
was a prodigious benefit that he lost his father when not much more than
fifteen. Perhaps it was an advantage also to his father that he died thus
early. Had he stayed a year longer, he would have seen himself despised,
baffled, and made ridiculous. For where, let us ask, in any age, was the
father capable of adequately sustaining that relation to the unique Caius
Julius--to him, in the appropriate language of Shakspeare,
"The foremost man of all this world?"
And, in this fine and Caesarean line, "this world" is to be understood not
of the order of co-existences merely, but also of the order of
successions; he was the foremost man not only of his contemporaries, but
also of men generally--of all that ever should come after him, or should
sit on thrones under the denominations of Czars, Kesars, or Caesars of the
Bosphorus and the Danube; of all in every age that should inherit his
supremacy of mind, or should subject to themselves the generations of
ordinary men by qualities analogous to his.
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