reateship is a model of hearty congratulation; the grotesquely humorous Charles Lamb; the droll wit of Sydney Smith; and the pen of Hood, dipped alike in the springs of laughter and the sources of tears.' And the list might be supplemented by the names of other letter-writers, long or lately passed away, whose correspondence was above price to its direct recipients, and would find its value justly estimated by posterity.* It is extremely undesirable that discouragements should be multiplied to the cultivation of letter-writing in an age, when it requires self-discipline to write letters at all; and, therefore, we desire to touch but lightly the blot most conspicuous in most published collections. There may be conscious letter-writers, who would fain be put in a book' when the hand that held the pen can no more do its office. Yet not even these would look complacently on the prospect of surviving in three or thrice-three octavo volumes of correspondence, which, by reason of press and damnable iteration' of matter, could never possibly be read. A remedy for this would be found in less editorial scruple as to weeding what is either superfluous or purely compositional.' Modest, sensible writers would have more inducement to write with that freedom and lack of constraint without which a letter is worthless, if there were less reason to fear that all they wrote about everything and nothing' would find its way into print. And, as to the other class, there would be less encouragement for that dissembled labour in composition, which is referable to the hope of eventual publication, and which Colton in his Lacon' likens to the dishabille in which a beauty would have you believe you have surprised her, after spending three hours at the toilette.' Our. very best letterwriters have written on the spur of the moment, with no ulterior aim; and art in letter-writing has no chance against nature.

But to leave the question of future publication, a question not of the essence of letter-writing-is not the art or gift 'per se' deserving to be cherished? If it can abridge distance, beguile loneliness, enliven old age, add zest to the friendships

* Such a supplement, slight but amusing, will be found in Mr. Seton's 'Gossip about Letters and Letter-Writing,' published this year (1870), a little volume which deals, in gossiping fashion, with the manner as well as the matter of letterwriting. As to matter we imagine that the author would not lay claim to more than an acute filling in of the outlines furnished by Charles Knight, though he gives one peculiarly thankworthy addition to the list of first-class female letterwriters, in the person of Lady Duff-Gordon. Not one word of what he says of the unaffected style, catholicity of spirit, and largeness of heart, of the daughter of Mrs. Austin, is superfluous. Mr. Seton's gossip about præloquiums and postscripts, laconic letters and love-letters, autographs and handwritings, legible and illegible, will help to beguile a stray half-hour very passably.

Colton, Lacon,' vol. i., cxxv.

of middle life, and communicate home-influences to the boy or the girl at school, its office and mission is worthy of maintenance. We leave out of consideration 'the banished lover and the captive maid,' for whose sake Pope's Eloisa supposed heaven to have first taught letters;' although the remotest prospect of either contingency should stimulate young ladies to the attainment, in which their grandames shone pre-eminent. There is for them one sovereign specific for wafting a sigh from Indus to the Pole,' in a way more time-honoured than the Electric Telegraph to sit down pen in hand, and let a clear head dictate the promptings of a free heart. Reading and cultivation will, no doubt, tell upon style and matter; and facility of expression may be enhanced by practice in composition; but as there is a nearer prospect of higher education for women, and as 'English' is every day less ignored in boys' schools, we may expect to find these conditions of success become equally attainable. In one point, leisure, the ladies have an advantage, which if they imitate Hannah More's abnegation, they will decline to exchange for woman's rights or the franchise. They will prefer to emulate the Sévignés and the Berrys and to bind the busier lords of creation with fetters they will have no inclination to shake off. This power involves no store of tropes and metaphors, nothing but their native tact, and the neatness which is an article of their creed. I think it as improper and indecorous,' writes Savage Landor's Pericles to Aspasia, to write a stupid or a silly note to you, as one in a bad hand, or on coarse paper. Familiarity ought to have a worse name, if it relaxes in its attentiveness to please.'* Where the precautions necessary are so few and simple, there need never be a failure of pleasant and successful letter-writers.

ART. IX.-1. Report on Military Organisation. (Ordered to be printed 9th July, 1860.)

2. Report on the Administration of the Transport and Supply Departments of the Army. (Presented by Command, 1867.) 3. Reports (3) on Arrangements in force for the Conduct of Business in the Army Departments. (Presented by Command, 1870.) 4. The Military Forces of the Crown, their Administration and Government. By Charles M. Clode. 2 vols. 8vo. London, 1869. HE Constitutional history of the English Army cannot be said to begin earlier than the reign of William III. Prior to that era the law recognised no such distinctions as it now draws Pericles and Aspasia ;' Letter cxlii.

between

between the civilian and the soldier. As it had been in the Saxon times, as it was under the Normans and the Plantagenets, so it continued to be while the Tudors reigned, and even under the first Sovereigns of the House of Stewart. The services of every able-bodied man were held to be due to his country as often as its peace was threatened, whether from without or from within. The care of defending the realm was entrusted exclusively to the Crown. All the fortified places within the kingdom were assumed to be the King's fortresses; all the military stores in the kingdom were the King's stores. Nobles, knights, and yeomen were indeed required to keep their weapons ready and to exhibit them at stated seasons; but the law authorised their use only in the King's service. Nor was this state of things peculiar only to the times of which we are accustomed to speak as feudal. It was the same after gunpowder had put the long-bow out of date, and militia laws, properly so called, superseded the customs of the military array. The Legislature never, by any of its enactments, recognised till after the Revolution of 1688 the existence of what may be called a military caste.

In the great civil war between Charles 1. and his Parliament we find the way opened, for the first time, to a new state of things. Both parties professed to fight in that war for the Crown and the Constitution; and the Constitution perished when the head which used to wear the crown rolled upon the scaffold. But the army which had abolished the kingly office proved, in the hands of its General, mainly instrumental in undoing its own work. It is not, therefore, to be wondered at, that both Charles II. and James II. should have desired to keep it in full force, and to

attach it to their own persons. They had seen, in their exile, how continental Sovereigns ruled, and were naturally desirous of employing the same means of guarding the prerogatives of the Crown against the encroachments of the subject. But the same hostility to the power of the sword which had distinguished their forefathers still prevailed among the English people, and Charles II., at the instigation of his Chancellor (Hyde), consented to disband the army. The Act, however, which effected this sanctioned the continuance of guards and garrisons. The garrisons were to be re-established, and placed on the same footing as in the year 1637; while with regard to the residue of the troops, including some regiments then in Scotland, the King was permitted to retain such of them or any of them as his Majesty might think fit otherwise to dispose of or provide for out of his own charges.'

This act gave to the King an authority which admitted of

easy

easy abuse. He raised men as he required them by impressment. He quartered his troops upon the people. He scarcely restrained their excesses by the application of military law to offenders, whom he protected against all interference with them by the civil magistrate. An army so recruited, disposed of, and managed, which refused obedience to any other code of laws than the Articles of War issued by the Sovereign, could not fail to be, throughout the reign of Charles II., a fruitful source of controversy between the King and his Parliament. Matters did not improve in this respect after James II. came to the throne. All the abuses, as they were called, which his brother introduced he retained, adding yet another even more obnoxious to popular feeling than the rest. He filled the ranks of his regiments with Irish Roman Catholics, and, wherever the arrangement could be brought about, placed Roman Catholic colonels at their head.

The revolution of 1688 introduced important changes into the administration, not less of the military than of the civil affairs of the country. James II. had played a bold game. He aimed at nothing less than governing through the army and without a Parliament; but the army refused to support him, and he lost his game and his crown together. Enough, however, had been done thoroughly to alarm the nation, and in offering the crown to William care was taken that it should be accepted only on conditions incompatible with a repetition of any such attempt hereafter. Indeed, the convention-for the term Parliament can hardly be applied to the noblemen and gentlemen who changed the dynasty-did more than this. They felt that there were two evils to be guarded against, the one as dangerous to public liberty as the other. The experiment had been tried of a parliamentary army, officered mainly by persons to whom their daily pay was existence. This army not only set at nought the orders for its own disbandment issued by the Government which it professed to serve, but turned upon its masters, put them aside, and set up a military despotism. An army of cavaliers, owing no allegiance except to the Crown, might have achieved the same end, and probably would have done so, had its officers been taken from the same class in society which furnished occupants to almost all the subordinate posts in the parliamentary army. But the officers of the Royal army were gentlemen, men of good family and estate-an arrangement, by-the-by, which the House of Commons had, with marked emphasis, pressed upon Charles II., and his adoption of which enabled him to tide over one, at least, of the many oppositions that were raised to an increase in his regiments. These gentle

men

men never for a moment thought of weighing the retention of their daily pay against the interests of their country. They fell off from the King as soon as they discovered that he was betraying the Constitution. Their loyalty was due to a loyal Sovereign; they withdrew it from James when he became disloyal. And here, in passing, we would venture to point out that this it is which has rendered the English army, ever since, a source of strength, and not of danger, to law and order. In other countries, where the boast is that each private soldier carries a marshal's bâton in his knapsack, no revolution has ever occurred except through the instrumentality or connivance of the army. In England, where men accustomed from their boyhood to command, are the accepted leaders of men, accustomed from their boyhood to obey, we are entirely exempt from such hazard. Let us take care that, in our anxiety to throw open to intellectual competition the honour of serving the Crown, and to abolish the purchase system, which by-the-by is as old as the standing army itself, we do not open the door to abuses more pernicious than exist now. Here and there men raised from the ranks prove themselves worthy of the advancement to which they have attained; and, doubtless, in the classes from which our private soldiers are chiefly drawn may be found individuals qualified in every respect to direct both the movements of armies and the deliberations of senates. But as a general rule, that army will prove the best servant to a Constitutional State, in which the social relations of man and officer are but a reflex of what they would have been had both remained in civil life-the one trained to labour, it may be, with his hands-the other with his head.

The great men who brought about the Revolution of 1688 rated at its full worth the benefits that accrued to the State, from the constitution of the army, as they found it. But they were not disposed to make the continued existence of parliamentary government dependent upon conditions so uncertain. They set themselves, therefore, to solve the problem how far it would be possible, without risking a divided allegiance, so to place the army between the Sovereign and the Parliament, that the influence of the one might keep the other in equipoise, and the liberty of the subject be secured without trenching on the just prerogatives of the Crown. That this most difficult and delicate end was in principle attained by the passing of the Bill of Rights and the Act of Settlement, every reader of history is aware. But the special arrangements made to ensure the perpetuity of the device, and the changes more or less important,

that