be a more dangerous character.  Through all the blunt periods of his military or civil proclamations, we see the proud, careless boy, fighting for fighting sake, and always finding his own side the right one.  He could not have much charity for the most generous opponents; he certainly had none at all for those who (as he said) printed malicious and lying pamphlets against him “almost every morning,” in which he found himself saluted as a “nest of perfidious vipers,” “a night-flying dragon prince,” “a flapdragon,” “a caterpillar,” “a spider,” and “a butterbox.”

He was the King’s own nephew,—­great-grandson of William the Silent, and son of that Elizabeth Stuart from whom all the modern royal family of England descends.  His sister was the renowned Princess Palatine, the one favorite pupil of Descartes, and the chosen friend of Leibnitz, Malebranche, and William Penn.  From early childhood he was trained to war; we find him at fourteen pronounced by his tutors fit to command an army,—­at fifteen, bearing away the palm in one of the last of the tournaments,—­at sixteen, fighting beside the young Turenne in the Low Countries,—­at nineteen, heading the advanced guard in the army of the Prince of Orange,—­and at twenty-three, appearing in England, the day before the Royal Standard was reared, and the day after the King lost Coventry, because Wilmot, not Rupert, was commander of the horse.  This training made him a general,—­not, as many have supposed, a mere cavalry-captain;—­he was one of the few men who have shown great military powers on both land and sea; he was a man of energy unbounded, industry inexhaustible, and the most comprehensive and systematic forethought.  It was not merely, that, as Warwick said, “he put that spirit into the King’s army that all men seemed resolved,”—­not merely, that, always charging at the head of his troops, he was never wounded, and that, seeing more service than any of his compeers, he outlived them all.  But even in these early years, before he was generalissimo, the Parliament deliberately declared the whole war to be “managed by his skill, labor, and industry,” and his was the only name habitually printed in capitals in the Puritan newspapers.  He had to create soldiers by enthusiasm, and feed them by stratagem,—­to toil for a king who feared him, and against a queen who hated him,—­to take vast responsibilities alone,—­accused of negligence, if he failed, reproached with license, if he succeeded.  Against him he had the wealth of London, intrusted to men who were great diplomatists, though new to power, and great soldiers, though they had never seen a battle-field till middle life; on his side he had only unmanageable lords and penniless gentlemen, who gained victories by daring, and then wasted them by license.  His troops had no tents, no wagons, no military stores; they used those of the enemy.  Clarendon says, that the King’s cause labored under an incurable disease of want of money, and that the only cure for starvation was a victory.  To say, therefore, that Rupert’s men never starved is to say that they always conquered,—­which, at this early period, was true.