“Bolivar would ape the great man. He aspires to be a second Bonaparte in South America, without possessing a single talent for the duties of the field or the cabinet.... He has neither talents nor abilities for a general, and especially for a commander-in-chief.... Tactics, movements, and manœuvres are as unknown to him as to the lowest of his troops. All idea of regularity, system, or the common routine of an army, or even a regiment, he is totally unacquainted with. Hence arises all the disasters he meets, the defeats he suffers, and his constant obligations to retreat whenever opposed to the foe.”
Certainly his life was one of extraordinary vicissitudes; he was perpetually flying from, or returning to, his country. At one moment an outcast, at the next making a glorious entry into Carácas. In reference to one of these returns the author I first quoted, says:—
“The entry of General Bolivar into Carácas (August 4th, 1813) was the most gratifying event of his whole military career. But here I cannot omit to mention a singular and characteristic trait of that vanity of which I have already spoken. Previous to his entry into Carácas, a kind of triumphal car was prepared, like that which the Roman consuls used on returning from a campaign after an important victory. Theirs was drawn by horses; but Bolivar’s car was drawn by twelve fine young ladies, very elegantly dressed in white, adorned with the national colours, and all selected from the first families in Carácas. They drew him in about half-an-hour from the entrance of the city to his residence; he standing on the car, bareheaded and in full uniform, with a small wand of command in his hand. To do this was surely extraordinary on their part; to suffer it was surely much more so on his. Many thousands were eye-witnesses of the scene.”
The same year Bolivar was again a fugitive. Once more, in December 1842, the inhabitants of Carácas flocked in immense throngs with banners, pennants, oriflammes, and trophies of war, to do honour to Bolivar. But this time it was a funeral procession, as the remains of the Liberator were being brought for interment in the city. In a poem on Simon Bolivar, Whittier has written:—
“How died that victor? In the field with banners o’er him thrown,
With trumpets to his falling ear, by charging squadrons blown,
With scattered foemen flying fast and fearfully before him,
With shouts of triumph swelling round, and brave men bending o’er him?
Not on his fields of victory, nor in his council hall,
The worn and sorrowful leader hears the inevitable call,