brilliant in its results if we should meet with no disaster in the details, and if the time for its execution had arrived." ^o
Again, imagination so highly developed has its positive dangers. It distracts a man from reality. " Driveling on possibilities," writes Davis to Beauregard himself. ^^ Again and again the phrase occurs to me, in spite of its un- reasonable savageness. *' Driveling on possibilities."
And plans so elaborately developed hamper, because they can never be exactly carried out, and the breaking of one link disorders the whole. If your plan does not work in all its complications, what are you to do? This befell Beauregard at Bull Run, as he himself admits. It befell again at Shiloh. It would have befallen elsewhere.
Also, if you are apt at imagining plans for yourself, you imagine them for your enemy. This was a weakness of Beauregard's. He would have withdrawn before Shiloh because he conceived that Grant would do what Beaure- gard might have done in his place. And the same thing occurred frequently.
Yet Beauregard's confidence in these schemes of his is inexhaustible and he is able to communicate it to his admirers. He does at times admit the bare possibility of accident. ** There still remains, of course, the hazard of accidents in execution, and the apprehension of the enemy's movements upsetting your own." ^^ But, for the most part, his plans are absolutely certain of success ; they cannot fail, if adopted, to shatter the enemy and free the Confederacy forever and forever. If Lee will do as
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