them on those under his command. He was firm in his

resolves and true to his promises. To quickness of decision he united conciseness in his conversation and his writings. His rough and ready manners, along with the laconic style of his orders which were often couched in rhyme, made him the favourite of his soldiers, for whom he had peculiar terms of endearment. Although he used to say that all his tactics consisted in the two magic words, 'Advance and strike,' he showed in the course of his long career great skill in the higher qualities of a general. A colossal statue in St. Petersburgh, is evidence of the respect which the Russians, Emperor and people, felt for this, the greatest military genius that country has produced.

It must have been a gala day in Newport when the troops at Parkhurst gave this hearty welcome to a Russian victory. Bunting would be flying in the streets, which were thronged by the young and fair, great grandmothers of the present generation, with their short-waisted gowns of that period, which to our eyes look so quaint; and the gentlemen of the island would come in for the occasion in their blue, green, or brown coats, white marcello waistcoats single-breasted, and cream-white kerseymere breeches. The Union Jack had not at that time got its present complement of crosses, because the union which introduced the cross of St. Patrick into the national flag had not received the royal assent. Within the last few years the Cameron Highlanders, formerly the 79th Regiment, and the Shropshire Light Infantry, once the 85th Regiment, have been quartered at Parkhurst, but we must not suppose that the famous 79th, and no less famous 85th, both of them in 1799 under the command of General Don, had the same uniforms which we associate with these two distinguished corps. Military costume has changed quite as much as that of civilians. A glance at an old print of the reviews so common in those days will give a clearer notion of how the regular troops looked on that day of rejoicing for our Russian ally's victory than any description in words. The 79th, not long then enrolled, would march, headed by its regimental colours, and the playing of the national pipers. As Egmont-op-Zoom, which was fought on October 2, 1799, is the first in the long roll of victorious battles

emblazoned on the colours of the Cameron Highlanders, we may suppose that the 79th soon left Parkhurst and its then lately constructed quarters, to follow the Duke of York to the Netherlands. This regiment and their comrades of the 85th belonged to that army, which would go anywhere and do anything.' But no doubt the spectators in the Isle of Wight who looked on this military ceremonial turned their attention mainly to their own Militia and Volunteers. They would scan their regularity of step, and the smartness in which these citizen soldiers performed their exercises more closely than the manoeuvres of their more regularly drilled companions in arms. White handkerchiefs

would be waved when the Volunteers, obeying the call in due costume, were marshalled in the High-street of Newport. As off they went, stepping it well, shoulder to shoulder, foot to foot, like brethren, like Englishmen, like men that have a home and a country to defend, like men who, if it must be so, will meet their enemy on the coast; an honest pride filled the hearts of the civil-service lookers on, who said to themselves, the French will never stable their cavalry horses in Carisbrooke Church.

James Gillray, who stands foremost among the political caricaturists of the reign of George the Third, has a cartoon in four parts, exhibiting John Bull, first, enjoying himself at his fireside in the bosom of his family; secondly, John puffed up with warlike fervour, eager for battle and marching off defiantly to conquer or die, at the head of his troops; thirdly, John's property in danger, all his household goods being taken to the pawnshop to supply the wants of his wife and children during his absence; and fourthly, the glorious return of John, who comes back at the conclusion of the campaign in miserable rags and tatters and minus one eye and a limb, to find his wife and children half-naked and famine-stricken, and huddled together by a blink of fire over the relics of a starvation meal. None the less because of his hatred for war and bloodshed was Gillray, like most of the nation, a true patriot. Not mere bluster made these Volunteers tread it well to the inspiriting music of the fife and drum. Nearly all thoughtful men who have reflected upon that tremendous crisis in English history have observed that

the military organization of our population had much to do in checking Irish disloyalty and French invasion. The poet Wordsworth indeed said that the power of armies was a visible thing, but that none could measure the invisible strength which there was in a people rising as the Spaniards rose. Our soldiers came back from the Peninsular campaign, and told us that this supposed invisible strength had been connected with contempt of discipline, with extreme savageness, and great treachery. The organic force of trained armies had proved itself much mightier and much nobler. Most of us feel that among certain symptoms of the decay of national feeling in our days in England the Volunteer movement is one of the more healthy signs of a desire among our people to defend the life of the nation, which has endured for so many generations, against the tyrant will whether of a single despot or of the multitude crouching in submission to what its leader or leaders may dictate to it. So it was with the Volunteers in the war with revolutionary France. If we had not resisted to the death, that one man, whether calling himself First Consul or Emperor, England might have fared as Prussia and Austria were treated at his hands.

At first the war was not unpopular in England. It pressed most hardly upon those who had settled incomes; the income-tax took a tenth of the resources of a family, the window-tax and other parliamentary assessments, with the parochial rates, took another tenth, and the quartern loaf was eighteenpence. Agricultural interests did not suffer. As we have just been reminded, wheat, which is now selling at Newport Market at 17. 14s. per quarter, was in May 1799 sold at 37. IS. 10d. for the same quantity. Farmers, who were working out long leases granted on easy terms, were then making fortunes, and as to the landowners, the war taxes had not at that early date much injured them. I remember the late Mr. How, formerly of Brooke House, but latterly of Bedford villa, Carisbrooke, who lived to a very advanced age, and was full of reminiscences of the past, saying to me, that Boney (the playful sobriquet of our forefathers for our deadly foe) was the best friend the farmers ever had.

Shelves upon shelves are filled with carefully written books,

which describe that era of European catastrophes, social dissolution, and bloodshed, and also of national renovation, which dates its commencement somewhere about just a century ago, and came to the close with the crowning victory of Waterloo. Now, as Mr. Thackeray has somewhere said, people talk about Waterloo as they do of the battle of Blenheim. How can it be expected that they should care to hear of one of Suvorov's victories? Young men and maidens who are preparing themselves to pass local examinations may, if the subject is set to them, read all about that great Russian and his campaign in Alison, or in those more compendious short-cuts of knowledge of which studious youth can avail itself. We grown-up people have other matters to think of; we have to look out, if we interest ourselves in politics, for the next move of 'the old Parliamentary hand.' Yet somehow or another we all like to catch an occasional glimpse, such as this entry in the Isle of Wight Magazine affords, of that wonderful epoch in our history when England had to contend sometimes against all the world for her Island home, for her liberties, her existence, her Christianity. No wonder that she should welcome the successes of an ally, when she had so few friends on the continent of Europe. The Isle of Wight of our ancestors in the last century was, it seems, merrier and more jovial than that which we inhabit. In spite of much tribulation, people, both high and low, managed to enjoy themselves. We are a hundred years older. That age of the world which had its birth about the time of the French Revolution is advanced in years, and has outlived the illusions of its youth. A writer of our own times has laid it down that there never was a period when there seemed to be less hopefulness among mankind. However this may be, a foreboding overshadows the thoughts of many persons, that the close of this nineteenth century may witness a great Armageddon fight between the forces of good and evil. Our fathers and grandfathers in the last year of the last century entered upon that fight in the assured faith that good in the end must have the final victory. We, if Christians, hold to the same belief; let us act upon it as they did, and we need not be afraid. June 12, 1886.

THE ISLE OF WIGHT MAGAZINE, 1799, AND THE ACT OF UNION BETWEEN GREAT BRITAIN AND IRELAND.

In the closing year of the last century the Isle of Wight could boast of possessing, what it has not now, a monthly magazine of its own. The absence of such a publication is more than made up by the recent setting up of the County Press, which combines a full abstract of the local and general news of the week, with the information and amusement which is supplied by the bulkier forms of periodical literature.

The first number of this provincial publication was issued. from the printing office of John Albin, Newport, I.W., at the beginning of 1799, and was followed by monthly numbers in succession, along with an appendix and index, till the end of that year. The price of each of these monthly parts, which contained on an average between fifty and sixty pages of closely printed matter, was only sixpence, which in those days of dear literature was certainly very reasonable. Although the career of this enterprise was short-lived, it is creditable to the inhabitants of the Isle of Wight that its extinction did not proceed from any want of support on their part. In bidding farewell to his subscribers the publisher, in a notice dated Newport, Jan. 31, 1800, says that his 'periodical miscellany' has had an extensive sale and circulation, but that he has been obliged to discontinue its publication 'because of its interfering too much with other business which he is necessarily engaged in.' At the end of the eighteenth century periodical literature had not attained that vigour and power of literary expression which marked its production in the beginning of the following century; but the Isle of Wight Magazine may be said to have taken up a very fair position as compared with, at any rate, its provincial contemporaries of the same period.

Albin's magazine makes its bow and quits the stage with a retrospect of politics for the year by a writer with the signature of the letter X, which closes with the following words: