At this stage of affairs he was in excellent spirits, which even supported him under large advances of money; for his powers of convincing and persuading had not yet been tested by anything more difficult than a chairman's speech introducing other orators, or a dialogue with a Middlemarch voter, from which he came away with a sense that he was a tactician by nature, and that it was a pity he had not gone earlier into this kind of thing.
He was a great analyst, realistic, but also a tactician to get things done.
He was tall and muscular, a poet and an educated man, and a superb military tactician; yet he lacked the personal magnetism to gain and hold the loyalty of the common people.
