Bolivar was always a great reader. In his style and his quotations he shows
his predilection for the classics, especially for Plutarch's "Lives." He
also read much of the literature of the French Revolution. He was a very
impressive orator; his addresses and proclamations show much emphasis, and
the rhetorical artifice is apparent, as it is in all literature of this
kind. In his letters he uses a very simple and naturally witty style.
He was a great coiner of sentences, many of which can be found in his
proclamations and addresses. His political perspicacity was remarkable.
He could and did break the conventionalities and the political principles
sacred in that epoch, to formulate those which were better for the
condition of the country. He was a shrewd judge of men, and knew how to
honor them and please them for the good of the cause they defended. All his
intellectual power was necessary to become a master of men like Paez and
Bermudez. His mental alertness was exceptional. He could make a decision
promptly without showing the effect of haste. He had a brain for large
problems and for small details. He would attend to the organization of his
army down to the most minute details, as well as to the preparations for
long campaigns.
The most admirable moral quality of Bolivar was his constancy. It rose
above everything.
His energy was marvelous to carry him through the difficulties he had to
encounter. In defeat he had
"the virtue of Antheus as no other hero had to such a degree; a
singular virtue of growing to more gigantic proportions when the fall
had been deepest and hardest; he had something like a strengthening
power to assimilate the sap of adversity and of discredit, not through
the lessons of experience, but through the unconscious and immediate
reaction of a nature which thus fulfils its own laws.
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