Crossword-Solution: OUTDOING 8 letters, 1 clue 🏆 scrabble score: 10

The unbluffable would have triumphed anyhow, probably, because Napoleon was an academic soldier, doing the academic thing (the attack in columns and so forth) with superlative ability and energy; whilst Wellington was an original soldier who, instead of outdoing the terrible academic columns with still more terrible and academic columns, outwitted them with the thin red line, not of heroes, but, as this uncompromising realist never hesitated to testify, of the scum of the earth.

And after supper they sang songs, one against the other, each sweeter than the last, and told stories by turns, outdoing each other in fancy and invention; and at last went happily to bed.

Through all the town they wail like folk demented-high and low, and poor and rich-and it seems that each sets his will on outdoing all the others in making lamentation, and on never abandoning it of his own will.

Each is there as in the theater, unknown among the unknown, requiring sensational impressions and strong emotions, a prey to the contagion of the passions around him, borne along in the whirl of sounding phrases, of ready-made news, growing rumors, and other exaggerations by which fanatics keep outdoing each other.

This was the era when every man had but one desire, that of outdoing others in ferocity and brutality, and but one care, that of saving his own head by threatening that of his neighbour.