It is to be noted, what indeed we should expect, that this perpetual, complacent vanity was accompanied by little if any sense of humor. No man who caught glimpses, even momentarily, of himself and his achievements under the aspect of eternity could ever have regarded his achievements or himself with such smug satisfaction. Stuart was vain, too; but more in the sense of a full-blooded self-consciousness. He liked to be heard, to be seen, to make the world ring with his mellow voice. But it was a laughing voice and as ready to mock at Stuart as at any one. Beauregard, as a member of his staff writes me, 12 rarely jested with officers or soldiers. The gleam of a jest in his correspondence is also rare enough.
"I have written and telegraphed on the subject until my hand is hoarse." 13 And Cooke never saw a smile upon his face from their first meeting until some months later, after the battle of Manassas, though the biographer gives other instances of laughter in the following years. Cooke's comment on the general's smile is worth recording: "His laugh was peculiar; the eyes sparkled, the firm muscles slowly moved, and the white teeth came out with a quite startling effect under the heavy black moustache." 14 The laughter of a martialist, you see, grudging and of necessity, not Stuart's perpetual, joyous bubbling all over.
In one aspect Beauregard's vanity is harmless and amusing; but it had its more serious side in that it made him jealous, sensitive, suspicious, and so contributed a
