is considered a sort of head quarters. 2nd. One subaltern at Buckingham House. 3rd. One Captain and two Subalterns at the Tilt Yard-for that name, associated with the stately tourneys of the ages of Elizabeth and Henry VIII., still survives,-attached to the site of the Horse Guards. The officers in the Guards, it is well known, have rank in the army above what they hold in their regiments; but when on duty among themselves, the subalterns, that is, the Lieutenants and Ensigns, do all that appertains to those of the same nominal rank in regiments of the line. These three Guards supply the sentinels stationed at Buckingham and Storey's Gates, at the various Government Offices, at the entry from Spring Gardens into St. James's Park, at the Duke of York's Column, all round St. James's Palace, and about Buckingham House.

The guard at St. James's is the only one that mounts always with the Queen's colours. At all other guards-even guards of honour, unless it be for a crowned head-they mount with the colours of the regiment.

With the most showy and ceremonious mounting of a guard in England at St. James's Palace-with the less gorgeous but, perhaps, more imposing relief of the guard at the Horse Guards-with the close proximity of the Wellington and St. George's Barracks-with the marching and countermarching of the guards drawn from the cavalry barracks-with the marching of the infantry from the barracks above-named to drill or inspection in Hyde Park, the precincts of the Palace afford, of a forenoon, the most stirring military spectacle (apart from a regular review), to be seen in the kingdom. Within and around this region, the Guards-foot and horse-are the characteristic features of the scene, the real genii loci—and fine-looking fellows they are. As to their accoutrements, a uniform must be judged less as it tells upon the individual soldier than as it tells en masse upon a large body of men. But even upon individuals, the uniform of the Guards shows well. Somewhat ponderous and stiff they may be, but that bespeaks strength and discipline. The Blues too, in their enormous jackboots, when seen sauntering along on foot, remind us in this of swans, or a kindred species of bird, that they are fine-looking creatures in their element, but helpless out of it. They contrast, however, most favourably with the fantastic frippery of hussars and lancer regiments. They are substantial and genuine English. One can imagine Marlborough and Ligonier viewing them complacently they are in keeping with the athletic image of Shaw, who with his own arm slaughtered so many Frenchmen at Waterloo.

A soldier's is not an idle life, even in time of peace, whatever may be said to the contrary. His martial duties may appear trifling to those who know not the importance of keeping them a habit, but they consume much time and no little attention. Still, an officer in the Guards must, to a certain extent, be, while in London, a gay lounger. His position in society-the vicinities into which his duties carry him-keep him in close juxta-position with the gay world, and it is the easiest thing in nature, when he has but one spare moment, to drop into the dissipations of fashion for that brief space. Still, in the dead season, the town must seem a desert to him, and banishment to the Tower, a fate which he must be prepared to encounter at regular intervals, is tedium in the extreme. But he has his resources-the Guards' Club, and the dinners at St. James's and the

Bank.

Into the former we presume not to penetrate: a gentleman's club-house is his home, where he is entitled to shut the door on all strangers and hint to those admitted-" sub rosa." The dinners may be said in a manner to be at John Bull's expense, and John thinks he has a right to know how his money is spent. He has no reason to complain on the present occasion.

The subaltern at Buckingham Palace, the Captain and two Subalterns at the Horse Guards, and the Field Officer, Captain, and Subaltern at the head guard, dine together at St. James's. The Adjutant of the regiment which gives the guard dines with them if he feel disposed, and the Lieutenant Colonel has the privilege of inviting three friends. Any day on which he does not avail himself of this privilege, he gives it up to the other officers. Not belonging to the Leg of Mutton, or to the Noctes Ambrosianæ, or to the Cervantes schools of literature, we could at any time much more easily eat a good dinner than describe it; the reader, therefore, must hold us excused. The Guards' dinners at St. James's are of ancient standing, and it is a shame that now-a-days, when military men have betaken themselves to writing like their neighbours, none of their traditions have been given to the public. It is a thousand pities Miss Burney was not a guardsman: the records of the mess would have furnished forth much more inspiring incidents than the Frau Schwellenberg's dinners to the Equerries, at which “dear little" Fanny presided as vice-bedchamber-woman. To Gilray are we indebted for the only peep into the symposia of the Guards at St. James's with which the public has been favoured; and until some member of the corps takes up the pen to show that his predecessors could talk, joke, and sing to the purpose, the corps must be contented to be judged by that caricature.

The dinner at the Bank-but first a word of the Tower, "whither, at certain seasons, all the " guards are conveyed to do penance for a time for their junkettings at the other end of the town. There is generally, as has already been remarked, a battalion on duty here. The officer locally in command is called the Governor, but his actual rank is that of Tower or Fort Major only. All orders applying to the Tower exclusively, or as a garrison, such as parade for divine service, &c., are given by the Fort Major; but all other orders, such as the actual mounting of the guard, the Bank piquet, &c., come from the Field Officer on duty at the Horse Guards. The guard at the Tower is, as at the Palace, an officer's guard, and so is the piquet at the Bank, to which we now proceed.

Dinner is provided by the Bank for the officer on guard there and two friends. A snug, plain, excellent dinner it is, brought daily from one of the best taverns in the neighbourhood. The store which the Guards set by this dinnerexcellent though it be-speaks volumes for the ennui which broods over the period during which they are stationed at the Tower. Some time ago a regiment of the line was marched into the Tower, and the battalion of Guards withdrawn. All the other duties of the place were gladly and unreluctantly given up to the new-comers with the solitary exception of the inlying piquet at the Bank. The duty might have been given up, but to relinquish the dinner was impossible. And on this account, so long as the Tower remained denuded of the presence of the Guards, the Bank piquet, regularly detailed from the far West End, duly and daily threaded the crowded Strand, passed under

Temple Bar, jostled along Fleet Street, scrambled up Ludgate Hill, rounded St. Paul's, and over Cheapside, erst the scene of tournaments, charged home to the Bank of England. The cynosure of attraction to the weary sub on dutythe magnet which drew him to encounter this long and toilsome march, and worse, the incarceration of four-and-twenty mortal hours within the walls of the Bank, was not the ingots piled within these walls-his high spirit disdained them; not the bright eyes of City maid or dame-these must now be sought in the suburbs; it was the substantial savoury fare of the City-the genuine roast beef of Old England, and the City's ancient port, far surpassing the French cookery and French wines of St. James's.

But rich and substantial though the feast provided for the red-coated dragon (as Mause Headrigg might have termed him), who guarded the golden fruit of their Hesperides, by the merchant princes of the Bank of England, its merits were heightened in the estimation of the young guardsmen by the circumstances under which it was eaten. After a dreary banishment to the Tower for months -after the weariest period of that dull service, the dreary day, spent within the walls of the Bank-it is easy to conceive the relief felt by a young soldier as his moodiness relaxed and opened under the influence of good fare and good wine, and the chat of two favourite companions. Engagements that might have looked common-place elsewhere, and under other circumstances, were Elysium there and then. What a moment was that, when the hour of shutting the gates approaching, his visitors must leave him! The sweetest minute of the evening -he tasted it not in the bustle of leave taking, but, like all sweets approached to the mouth and withdrawn untasted, it lived for ever unchanged in remembrance. Such another moment is the five minutes before twelve at the St. James's dinner, when the butler enters, and with sly unconsciousness announces the hour, and the decanters are sent hastily round (no "black bottles" there), the glasses emptied and replenished, and a new supply ordered in-the last that can be issued from cellarage or butlery that night.

Amid the not unpleasing but somewhat monotonous hours of the life of an officer of the Guards on duty in London, these two dinners occupy a large space in his imagination. They are like the holidays to which a school-boy looks forward and backward; great part of his year is made up of them. He dates from their recurrence. Only one other dinner has ever held the same place in the estimation of Guardsmen-and its place was far higher. The Duke of York, when Commander-in-Chief, was frequently in the habit of dining at the Horse Guards on those days-and they were many-when he transacted business there. On such occasions it was his unvarying practice to invite the officer on guard to his table; and it has been our lot to hear a veteran who has seen much of life-from the gay quarters of London to the plague-stricken sands of Egypt-speak long afterwards of these dinners as among the most pleasing recollections of his life. The Duke of York was not, like his eldest brother," the first gentleman in Europe -he did not affect the society of wits, or shine himself in repartee-but he had a heart, and that was felt and acknowledged by every one who came into close connection with him. Spoiled he might be to some extent by his station-who would not? Grossier he might be in his tastes-it was the family failing. But he was kind to the last, and had a strong sense of justice. As a leader in the

field, though personally brave, he did not shine; but as Commander-in-Chief, as the organiser and upholder of an army in the Cabinet, England owes him a deep debt of gratitude. He was to the army what another Prince who bore the same title was, rather more than a century earlier, to the navy.

According to Fielding, Mrs. Bennet apologised to Amelia for inviting Serjeant Atkinson to take a cup of tea with her, by alleging that a serjeant in the Guards was a gentleman. The non-commissioned officers, and, we may say at the same time, the privates of these regiments retain the character to the present day. Bating his plundering and torturing propensities, Serjeant Bothwell, could he come alive again, would not find himself out of place among them. In former days, at Angelo's Rooms, we used to think the demeanour of the Household Cavalry quite as gentlemanly as some individuals of higher station, with whom they condescended to play at single-stick, and in the Fives Court the fancy Guardsmen were decidedly more gentlemanly than the pugilistic amateurs of rank. The British soldier of our days-and this remark is general, applicable to the whole army-is not a mere ignoramus. The regimental libraries have worked a wonderful change. We remember few more pleasant half-hours than one we spent in Mr. Constable's Miscellany warehouse in Edinburgh, listening to the comments of a committee of non-commissioned officers, from a regiment stationed at Piershill Barracks, who had come to town to choose some additions to their library. A higher and more uniform tone pervades the ranks now than used to be the case. It is a gross mistake to imagine the British soldier the mere machine some Gallicised writers have been pleased to represent him. There lurks a great deal of fallacy in what is said about the deterioration of the British soldier under "the cold shade of aristocracy." There are men by nature formed to take the direction, and others equally formed by nature to work out directions given to them. In the rudest state of society cach class finds in time its proper place. Organised, civilised society is merely a condition in which the combination of two such different classes has long been recognised, and in which the persons qualified to belong to either drop into their places at once. A person born with capacity for command will, in ordinary circumstances, either enter the army as an officer, or, if he cannot accomplish this, choose some other profession. There is nothing necessarily low or mean in occupying the subordinate station. On the contrary, there are qualities required to enable a man to fill a subordinate station with perfect efficiency, which, from the rarity of their occurrence, in a high degree lend an

extraordinary value to them when they do occur. It is much more easy to fill

a

regiment with passable ensigns, lieutenants, and captains, than with good efficient non-commissioned officers. This is felt by the best commanding officers, and such men are valued in proportion. Consciousness of their own worth, inspiring a just pride in belonging to their class, makes them a kind of natural aristocracy. The good soldier is not without a legitimate field of ambition, and the peculiar character of this field makes better soldiers than the vague dreaming prospect of becoming a Junot. Steele, in one of the best of his Tatlers, illustrates the high spirit and honourable ambition of the British serjeant: Farquhar's Kite (an irregular man of genius) was even then the exception, not the rule. The privates and non-commissioned officers of the Guards share this honest ambition with the regiments of the line, and, with all due deference to the latter, their

position as appendages to royalty gives them what Dr. O'Toole might call, the "top polish." Mrs. Bennet was right: a serjeant in the Guards is a gentleman, and she at least proved the sincerity of her opinion by taking the serjeant for husband and becoming Mrs. Atkinson.

a

But some people will have it that the Guards, one and all, are mere pampered loungers. Did they show themselves such at Waterloo? The truth is, that soldiers, like race-horses and fighting-cocks, are the better for being high fed and well dressed, or curry-combed. There is no greater delusion than that constant hard work and privation strengthen men against hardships. There is a certain limited time, during which human powers of exertion and endurance can be taxed without breaking down; and the better condition a man is in at starting, the longer he will hold out. The morale, too, as Buonaparte used to say, is nine-tenths of the soldiers' strength; and the morale of ill-fed, over-toiled men is always bad. There is a buoyancy of spirit about those who rush straightway from good, even luxurious, quarters to the field, that effects even more than their brawny frames. "But Hannibal's army at Capua!" Fudge! The poor rascals were half rotten with toil and famine, and killed or sickened themselves by repletion. It was sheer good eating that carried the Guards rough-shod over Napoleon's crack Cuirassiers-red cloth and roast-beef, against steel cuirass and soupe-maigre, carried the day. All Continental soldiers, who have ever measured bayonet or sabre with the British, know that it is impossible to withstand the charge of our wellfed men and horses. It has often made us laugh to hear our German military friends-brave, judicious men-arguing that English soldiers were too high-fed : it was impossible to keep either brute-the man or the beast-in hand. German troopers, and their steeds, were fed up to the right pitch-could be exercised among eggs without breaking one. They knew all the while that this martinet dexterity would be shivered in pieces the moment it came in contact with the ungovernable strength they affected to undervalue. This is the reason why, from the club-houses and saloons of St. James's, and from the Fives' Court and other places of more equivocal resort, men and officers of the Guards-men who had never seen a shot fired in anger-rushed straight to Waterloo and rode resistless over the tough veterans of a hundred fights. "Gallant Frenchmen," the heroes of old "Nulli Secundus" might have said, "not by us, but by our cookshops, have ye been vanquished!"

Enough of this. But as the building we have now in hand is one of those of which "least said is soonest mended," we have preferred talking about its live stock. Its halls are occupied by persons who think themselves of more consequence, and might take it amiss if they were altogether passed over in silence. Here are the offices of the Commander-in-Chief, the Military Secretary, the Quarter-Master-General, and Secretary at War; in other words, here is the "local habitation" of those who wield the gallant army of Great Britain.

Some time ago-à propos of the Admiralty--we had occasion to point out the admirable systematic arrangements which lurked under its apparent want of system. Looking to the Horse Guards, we fear it must be admitted that the want of centralised authority is in the case of the army carried to an extreme. The army is an engine not yet so well understood and appreciated in England as the navy. It is younger by a good many years. The Guards of Charles II.