branch of the military service, but the whole army, and even the navy. Arms, ammunition, and military stores of every description (including guns and carriages for the navy), are supplied by them to both services. Besides the clothing of the artillery and engineers, they furnish also that of part of the militia, of the police force in Ireland, and of some corps belonging to the army, and the great coats for all; they are likewise charged with the issue of various kinds of supplies, as of fuel, light, &c., both in Great Britain and abroad, and, with respect to the troops in Great Britain, of provision and forage. The construction and repair of fortifications, military works, and barracks, is another branch of the business of the department; which has also the duty, altogether unconnected with any thing of a military character, of furnishing various descriptions of stores for the use of the convict establishment in the penal colonies. The Commissariat officers on foreign stations correspond directly with the Treasury, and receive from it all orders with reference to the mode in which the service is to be performed. Till 1834 (when the duty was transferred to the Ordnance) the charge of the issue of forage and provisions to the troops in Great Britain was retained by the Treasury. Since that time the Agent for Commissariat supplies has been suppressed, and the number of clerks on the Commissariat establishment reduced. The Commissariat is a peculiar and important service, requiring great ability and much experience. During the whole time consumed by the British army in advancing from the frontiers of Portugal to the Pyrenees, the Commissariat officers had to feed daily 80,000 men and 20,000 horses. The money raised by the Commissariat department in specie, in silver and gold, in Spain and Portugal during the Peninsular war, by bills on this country, amounted to somewhere about 36,000,000l. sterling; and probably 10,000,000l. more was sent from England, and as much from the Mediterranean and other quarters. The justice and wisdom of the paltry economy of throwing part of the duties of this department upon the Ordnance, whose functions were already sufficiently onerous and complicated, and upon a reduced Board of quilldriving Treasury clerks who had no experience outside of their office, may well be doubted. But there can be no doubt as to the gross injustice of throwing all the able and experienced Commissariat officers, trained in the arduous affairs of the Peninsula, upon half-pay, instead of remodelling the Commissariat department by placing some of them at the head of it. A system might thus have been organised by men who had been taught their business experimentally, in a school such as it is to be hoped no individuals may for many generations have a chance of entering. An opportunity has been let slip of perfecting this branch of the service which will be felt as soon as Britain is again dared to the field, for the gift of military financiering does not come by nature. Since the abolition of the Comptrollers of Army Accounts, the Commissioners of Audit, in addition to their former duty of auditing the accounts of a part of the expenditure of the Commissioners for the service of the army on every foreign station, have also acted as advisers to the Treasury in military business in general, and particularly in all that relates to the Commissariat. Properly speaking, the Commissariat and Audit Board are both branches of the Treasury. This be the most proper place to notice that by the Act 5 and 6 of William IV. the separate offices of Paymaster of the Forces, Treasurer of Chelsea Hos may pital, Treasurer of the Navy, and Treasurer of the Ordnance, are all consolidated into the one office of Paymaster General. This office is also immediately under the control of the Treasury. Lastly, the Commissioners of Chelsea Hospital are charged with the management of the internal affairs of the hospital, with the admission of in-pensioners, the placing of discharged soldiers on the out-pension, and the issuing of warrants for payment of their pensions. Their proceedings are governed by the patent by which they are appointed, the instructions consequent thereon prepared by the Secretary at War, by various Acts of Parliament regulating particular points, and by occasional instructions conveyed to them by the Treasury and by the Secretary at War. Amid all this scattering of military business through a number of departments, it is clear that the authorities at the Horse Guards-the Secretary at War and the Commander-in-Chief-remain the nucleus, the heart of the military organisation of Great Britain. Independent though the Master of the Ordnance be, his arm is regarded but as an auxiliary, an adjunct to the army of the line. This manner of viewing it is carried to an extreme which occasions gross injustice to the corps of Artillery and Engineers. The best commanders of France-Napoleon himself—were bred in the Artillery. An English Artillery or Engineer officer cannot look forward to command in the field. "I look upon the Artillery," said Sir Augustus Fraser, in 1833, "to be a neglected service, and I know that it is so considered by the officers themselves. I look upon it that no corps that is solely advanced by seniorities and death-vacancies can come to perfection. When you have men of ability, the ability is locked up; when they have no ability they go on with the stream. The officers are all well educated, but to little purpose; and assuredly the state of the Artillery will force itself upon the country sooner or later. I have been forty years in the Artillery, and have got to be a Colonel, and I could go down a hundred men in the regiment without coming to any man much younger than myself." What Sir Augustus thought would be doing justice to his corps appeared from his replies to three questions of the Commissioners on the civil administration of the army in 1833: "Officers of Artillery and Engineers are very seldom appointed to command garrisons or districts." "Putting them upon the staff has been discouraged." "I am sure that a door might be opened for Artillery officers to go into the army with great advantage to the service and themselves." The best heads and the best educated intellects in the service are prevented from rising to command-that is not wise. But this is a digression. The Horse Guards is the centre of vitality of an army. This army consists of:-Cavalry: The first and second regiments of Life Guards, the royal regiment of the Horse Guards (blues), seven regiments of Dragoon Guards, three of Dragoons, nine of Light Dragoons, including Lancers and Hussars. In this enumeration the cavalry serving in India and the Cape corps of mounted riflemen are not included. Infantry: Three regiments of Guards, seventy-nine regiments of the line of one battalion each, the 60th (of the line) and the rifle brigade of two battalions each, two West India regiments, two companies of the royal staff corps, three Newfoundland and three royal veteran companies, the African corps, and the Ceylon regiment. To these fall to be added the Engineers and the Artillery, with the royal waggon-train, the arti ficers, the rocket corps, and the sappers and miners. The infantry and cavalry borne on the estimates of 1841 amounted to 80,738 officers and men, of whom 79,798 were effectives. The engineer corps amounted to 960 officers and men, and the artillery to 7051. This is, after all, but the skeleton of the army-the dry bones-the framework which gives it form and cohesion. The quivering flesh and bounding blood which renders it an object beautiful to look upon-the living spirit which lends it life and energy-are diffused through thousands of manly bosoms scattered over the whole globe. Some are chafing in compulsory idleness among the country towns, or manufacturing capitals of the old island; some are doing duty amid the sharp gales of Canada, amid the sweltering tropical heat of the Antilles, or in the anomalous land of kangaroos and convicts. Some have just been bearing the standard of their country in triumph into the very bowels of " the central flowery land," while others have been sharing in the alternate defeats and triumphs of the mountain-land of the Afghans. Rather than remain inactive, some of the more ardent spirits have been exploring or taking part in the frays of Persia and Turkistan, and of the rather more barbarous Christian republics of South America. There is scarcely a region of the earth in our day that has not seen a real line captain-that rare animal which excited such a sensation when it made its unexpected appearance at Charlie's Hope, in the person of Dandy Dinmont's deliverer. And a talisman is placed within these shabby tasteless walls -right under that ineffable cupola-of power to arrest at once the wandering propensities of the most distant of those fearless spirits, and call him home as tame as the sportsman's pointer when ordered to heel, or to send him forth again fiercer than sleuth-hound lancing on his prey. It is a strange thing, that military discipline, which fuses so many of a nation's fiercest and most wayward spirits as it were into one mind and one will! The armies of modern Europe have no parallel in any other age or region. Individual armies were formed by Alexander, by Baber, by Timur, and other conquerors; but they dissolved with the death of the master-spirit which called them together. But the armies of France, England, and Germany have an organic life independent of any individual: all of them are enduring as the civil institutions upon which they are engrafted. The army of France survived the dissolution of these institutions, and was all that was left to re-construct civil society after the Revolution. It is a fashion with those who have not thoroughly examined the matter, to speak lightly of an army's discipline and organisation, and to exalt what they call the irresistible enthusiasm of a people. It was not the people who repelled the Allied Sovereign, under the Duke of Brunswick from the French frontier, and carried the eagles of France in triumph over great part of Europe; it was not the people who struck down Napoleon in the red field of Leipzig. Popular enthusiasm gave a new stimulus to the army, but it was the traditional discipline and organisation inherited from Turenne, Montecuculi, Marlborough, Frederic the Great, and other masters of the art of war, which received the unformed materials of enthusiastic recruits, and in its hard press stamped them into heroes. An organised army upon modern principles can make soldiers of almost any materials; and the mightiest enthusiasm of individuals or nations is at best but the heavy wave which must break on the rock-like structure of an army, and fall back in foam, carrying with it at most some shattered fragments. A finer army, whether we regard its physical or moral qualities, never existed than our own at the present moment. Its services as a bulwark against aggression from without in time of war, or as an effective minister of the civil power in internal emergencies in time of peace, are invaluable. Higher scientific acquirements than exist among its "corps du génie" are not to be found; a more intelligent, moral, high-spirited, and lighthearted soldiery never made a monarch's heart high as she passed her eyes along their ranks. And where shall we look for such a wiry, wary master of his art to hold this beautiful but terrible power in hand as the present occupant of the Horse Guards? THOUGHT-Speech-Writing-Printing-these are, as it were, four successive developments of mind, each ascending in about the same degree beyond the other. Much as in Milton's similitude "Thus from the root Springs lightly the green stalk [or talk]-from thence the leaves Not, indeed, that any particular copy of a printed book, bound and lettered, much resembles a flower :-we must endeavour to conceive a printed book in the abstract, as Crambe did a Lord Mayor without horse, gown, and gold chain, or even stature, features, colour, hands, feet, or body. In this sense a printed book is really" the bright consummate flower" of thought. Here, however, our business is not with either books or booksellers in the abstract, but with the latter in humble concrete, or in flesh and blood. Although books were written, and to a certain extent published too, by copies of them being made by transcribers, before the invention of printing, yet it may safely be assumed that it was not till after the introduction of that art that the sale of them became a regular trade in England. In the height to which even literary civilization had grown in the ancient world of Greece and Rome, there were shops for books probably in all the considerable towns; and in modern Europe, in the middle ages, Bibles, and also other books, were sold at the fairs in many of the principal cities of the Continent; but these were rather general than local marts; indeed, literature then, when books for the most part were written in Latin, the common tongue of the learned in all countries, was European, rather than national, everywhere; the manufacture or sale of books on a large scale could only be carried on at the great central points of attraction and confluence; England, being out of the way of common resort, could scarcely VOL. V. Q |