looking Portuguese women, whose joy was so excessive that they waded up to their arm-pits through a heavy surf, and insisted on carrying us on shore on their backs! I never clearly ascertained whether they had been actuated by the purity of love or gold.

Our men were lodged for the night in a large barn, and the officers billetted in town. Mine chanced to be on the house of a mad-woman, whose extraordinary appearance I never shall forget. Her petticoats scarcely reached to the knee, and all above the lower part of the bosom was bare; and though she looked not more than middle aged, her skin seemed as if it had been regularly prepared to receive the impression of her last will and testament; her head was defended by a chevaux-de-frise of black wiry hair, which pointed fiercely in every direction, while her eyes looked like two burnt holes in a blanket. I had no sooner opened the door than she stuck her arms a-kimbo, and, opening a mouth, which stretched from ear to ear, she began vociferating "bravo, bravissimo.”

• Being a stranger alike to the appearance and manners of the natives, I thought it possible that the former might have been nothing out of the common run, and concluding that she was overjoyed at seeing her country re-enforced, at that perilous moment, by a fellow upwards of six feet high, and thinking it necessary to sympathise in some degree in her patriotic feelings, I began to "bravo" too; but as her second shout ascended ten degrees, and kept increasing in that ratio, until it amounted to absolute frenzy, I faced to the right about, and, before our téte-à-téte had lasted the brief space of three-quarters of a minute, I disappeared with all possible haste, her terrific yells vibrating in my astonished ears long after I had turned the corner of the street; nor did I feel perfectly at ease until I found myself stretched on a bundle of straw in a corner of the barn occupied by the

men.

'We proceeded, next morning, to join the army; and, as our route lay through the city of Coimbra, we came to the magnanimous resolution of providing ourselves with all manner of comforts and equipments for the campaign on our arrival there; but, when we entered it, at the end of the second day, our disappointment was quite eclipsed by astonishment at finding ourselves the only living things in a city, which ought to have been furnished with twenty thousand souls.'-pp. 8-10.

The campaign of 1810, as all the world knows, closed with the retirement of the army behind the lines of Torres Vedras. Our merry captain, who bears a mortal hatred to epic poetry, says that he, for his part, knew nothing of those celebrated "lines," excepting that he was told that one of them rested on the Tagus, and the other somewhere on the sea :

'I saw,' he adds, with my own eyes, a variety of redoubts and fieldworks on the various hills which stand between. This, however, I do know, that we have since kicked the French out of more formidable looking and stronger places; and, with all due deference be it spoken, I think that the Prince of Essling ought to have tried his luck against them, as he could only have been beaten by fighting, as he afterwards was without it! And if he thinks that he would have lost as many men by trying, as he did by not trying, he must allow me to differ in opinion with him.'-p. 26, 27. The picture of the occupations of the soldiers during the winter breathes of life, and is rich with humour :

'Our battalion was stationed in some empty farm-houses, near the end of the bridge of Santarem, which was nearly half a mile long; and our sentries and those of the enemy were within pistol-shot of each other on the bridge.

I do not mean to insinuate that a country is never so much at peace as when at open war; but I do say that a soldier can no where sleep so soundly, nor is he any where so secure from surprise, as when within musket-shot of his enemy.

We lay four months in this situation, divided only by a rivulet, without once exchanging shots. Every evening, at the hour

"When bucks to dinner go,
And cits to sup,"

it was our practice to dress for sleep: we saddled our horses, buckled on our armour, and lay down, with the bare floor for a bed and a stone for a pillow, ready for any thing, and reckless of every thing but the honour of our corps and country; for I will say (to save the expense of a trumpeter) that a more devoted set of fellows were never associated.

'We stood to our arms every morning at an hour before daybreak, and remained there until a grey horse could be seen a mile off, (which is the military criterion by which daylight is acknowledged, and the hour of surprise past,) when we proceeded to unharness, and to indulge in such luxuries as our toilet and our table afforded.

The Maior, as far as the bridge of Vallè, was navigable for the small craft from Lisbon, so that our table, while we remained there, cut as respectable a figure, as regular supplies of rice, salt fish, and potatoes could make it; not to mention that our pigskin was, at all times, at least three parts full of a common red wine, which used to be dignified by the name of blackstrap. We had the utmost difficulty, however, in keeping up appearances in the way of dress. The jacket, in spite of shreds and patches, always maintained something of the original about it; but woe befel the regimental small-clothes, and they could only be replaced by very extraordinary apologies, of which I remember that I had two pair at this period, one of a common brown Portuguese cloth, and the other, or Sunday's pair, of black velvet. We had no women with the regiment; and the ceremony of washing a shirt amounted to my servant's taking it by the collar, and giving it a couple of shakes in the water, and then hanging it up to dry. Smoothing-irons were not the fashion of the times, and, if a fresh well dressed aide-de-camp did occasionally come from England, we used to stare at him with about as much respect as Hotspur did at his "waiting gentlewoman."

The winter here was uncommonly mild. I am not the sort of person to put myself much in the way of ice, except on a warm summer's day; but the only inconvenience that I felt in bathing, in the middle of December, was the quantity of leeches that used to attach themselves to my personal supporters, obliging me to cut a few capers to shake them off, after leaving the

water.

Our picquet-post, at the bridge, became a regular lounge, for the winter, to all manner of folks.

I used to be much amused at seeing our naval officers come up from Lisbon riding on mules, with huge ships' spy-glasses, like six-pounders, strapped across the backs of their saddles. Their first question invariably

was, "Who is that fellow there," (pointing to the enemy's sentry close to us,) and, on being told that he was a Frenchman, "Then why the devil don't you shoot him!"'-pp. 32-36.

- Although very anxious to cultivate the friendship and good opinion of the French of the present day, and admitting that the discipline of their armies has been altogether reformed under their virtuous and excellent Dauphin, we must, at the same time, remind them, whenever a fit occasion offers, of the barbarous and savage mode in which Buonaparte's troops carried on warfare in the Peninsula. A sentence or two, describing but one scene, on the line of Massena's retreat in 1811, will almost overwhelm the mind with horror. Young women were lying in their houses, brutally violated; the streets were strewed with broken furniture, intermixed with the putrid carcasses of murdered peasants, mules, and donkeys, and every description of filth, that filled the air with pestilential nausea. The few starved male inhabitants who were stalking amid the wreck of their friends and property, looked like so many skeletons, who had been permitted to leave their graves, for the purpose of taking vengeance on their oppressors, and the mangled body of every Frenchman who was unfortunate or imprudent enough to stray from his column, showed how religiously they performed their mission.' From these abominable and disgraceful scenes, let us turn to our author's description of a bivouac, and of the several degrees of comfort which such an establishment is capable of affording :

'When a regiment arrives at its ground for the night, it is formed in columns of companies, at full, half, or quarter distance, according to the space which circumstances will permit it to occupy. The officer commanding each company then receives his orders; and, after communicating whatever may be necessary to the men, he desires them to " pile arms, and make themselves comfortable for the night." Now, I pray thee, most sanguine reader, suffer not thy fervid imagination to transport thee into elysian fields at the pleasing exhortation conveyed in the concluding part of the captain's address, but rest thee contentedly in the one where it is made, which in all probability is a ploughed one, and that, too, in a state of preparation to take a model of thy very beautiful person, under the melting influence of a shower of rain. The soldiers of each company have a hereditary claim to the ground next to their arms, as have their officers to a wider range on the same line, limited to the end of a bugle sound, if not by a neighbouring corps, or one that is not neighbourly, for the nearer a man is to his enemy, the nearer he likes to be to his friends. Suffice it, that each individual knows his place as well as if he had been born on the estate, and takes immediate possession accordingly. In a ploughed or a stubble field there is scarcely a choice of quarters; but, whenever there is a sprinkling of trees, it is always an object to secure a good one, as it affords shelter from the sun by day and the dews by night, besides being a sort of home or sign post for a group of officers, as denoting the best place of entertainment; for they hang their spare clothing and accoutrements among the branches, barricade themselves on each side with their saddles,

canteens, and portmanteaus, and, with a blazing fire in their front, they indulge, according to their various humours, in a complete state of gipsyfication.

There are several degrees of comfort to be reckoned in a bivouac, two of which will suffice.

'The first, and worst, is to arrive at the end of a cold wet day, too dark to see your ground, and too near the enemy to be permitted to unpack the knapsacks or to take off accoutrements; where, unincumbered with baggage or eatables of any kind, you have the consolation of knowing that things are now at their worst, and that any change must be for the better. You keep yourself alive for a while, in collecting material to feed your fire with. You take a smell at your empty calibash, which recalls to your remembrance the delicious flavour of its last drop of wine. Yon curse your servant for not having contrived to send you something or other from the baggage, (though you know that it was impossible). You then damn the enemy for being so near you, though probably, as in the present instance, it was you that came so near them. And, finally, you take a whiff at the end of a cigar, if you have one, and keep grumbling through the smoke, like distant thunder through a cloud, until you tumble into a most warlike sleep.

6

The next, and most common one, is, when you are not required to look quite so sharp, and when the light baggage and provisions come in at the heel of the regiment. If it is early in the day, the first thing to be done is to make some tea, the most sovereign restorative for jaded spirits. We then proceed to our various duties. The officers of each company form a mess of themselves. One remains in camp to attend to the duties of the regiment; a second attends to the mess; he goes to the regimental butcher, and bespeaks a portion of the only purchaseable commodities, hearts, livers, and kidneys; and also to see whether we cannot do the commissary out of a few extra biscuits, or a canteen of brandy; and the remainder are gentlemen at large for the day. But while they go hunting among the neighbouring regiments for news, and the neighbouring houses for curiosity, they have always an eye to their mess, and omit no opportunity of adding to the general stock.

Dinner hour, for fear of accidents, is always the hour when dinner can be got ready; and the 14th section of the articles of war is always most rigidly attended to, by every good officer parading himself round the camp kettle at the time fixed, with his haversack in his hand. A haversack on service is a sort of dumb waiter. The mess have a good many things in common, but the contents of the haversack are exclusively the property of its owner; and a well regulated one ought never to be without the following furniture, unless when the perishable part is consumed, in consequence of every other means of supply having failed, viz. a couple of biscuits, a sausage, a little tea and sugar, a knife, fork, and spoon, a tin cup, (which answers to the names of tea-cup, soup plate, wine-glass, and tumbler,) a pair of socks, a piece of soap, a tooth-brush, towel, and comb, and half a dozen cigars.

After doing justice to the dinner, if we feel in a humour for additional society, we transfer ourselves to some neighbouring mess, taking our cups, and whatever we mean to drink, along with us, for in those times there is nothing to be expected from our friends beyond the pleasure of their con

versation and, finally, we retire to rest. To avoid inconvenience by the tossing off of the bed-clothes, each officer has a blanket sewed up at the sides, like a sack, into which he scrambles, and, with a green sod or a smooth stone for a pillow, composes himself to sleep; and, under such a glorious reflecting canopy as the heavens, it would be a subject of mortification to an astronomer to see the celerity with which he tumbles into it. Habit gives endurance, and fatigue is the best night-cap; no matter that the veteran's countenance is alternately stormed with torrents of rain, heavy dews, and hoar-frosts; no matter that his ears are assailed by a million mouths of chattering locusts, and by some villainous donkey, who every half hour pitches a bray note, which, as a congregation of presbyterians follow their clerk, is instantly taken up by every mule and donkey in the army, and sent echoing from regiment to regiment, over hill and valley, until it dies away in the distance; no matter that the scorpion is lurking beneath his pillow, the snake winding his slimy way by his side, and the lizard galloping over his face, wiping his eyes with its long cold tail.

'All are unheeded, until the warning voice of the brazen instrument sounds to arms. Strange it is, that the ear which is impervious to what would disturb the rest of the world besides, should alone be alive to one, and that, too, a sound which is likely to soothe the sleep of the citizens, or at most, to set them dreaming of their loves. But so it is: the first note of the melodious bugle places the soldier on his legs, like lightning; when, muttering a few curses at the unseasonableness of the hour, he plants himself on his alarm post, without knowing or caring about the cause.'-pp. 41-48.

We fancy that after such a description as this, the civil reader would have no very violent desire to share the comforts of a bivouac. We shall now initiate him in the music of war, as it was played at the siege of Ciudad Rodrigo, in 1812.

'When we arrived on the ground I was sent to take command of the highland company, which we had at that time in the regiment, and which was with the left wing, under Colonel Cameron. I found them on piquet, between the right of the trenches and the river, half of them posted at a mud cottage, and the other half in a ruined convent, close under the walls. It was a very tolerable post when at it; but it is no joke travelling by daylight up to within a stone's throw of a wall, on which there is a parcel of fellows who have no other amusement but to fire at every body they see.

We could not show our noses at any point without being fired at; but, as we were merely posted there to protect the right flank of the trenches from any sortie, we did not fire at them, and kept as quiet as we could be, considering the deadly blast that was blowing around us. There are few situations in life where something cannot be learnt, and I, myself, stand indebted to my twenty-four hours' residence there, for a more correct knowledge of martial sounds than I gained in the study of my whole life time besides. They must be an unmusical pair of ears that cannot inform the wearer whether a cannon or a musket played last, but the various notes, emanating from their respective mouths, admit of nice distinctions. My party was too small, and too well sheltered to repay the enemy for the ex