ted * That no man from henceforth shall be charged varm himself otherwise than he was wont in the time This prog nitors, the kings of England; and that no can be compelled to go out of his shire but where neity requireth, and sudden coming of strange enemies to the realin; and then it shall be done as hath been used in times past for the strength of the realm." This statute is supposed to have put a stop, for a considerable time, to the arbitrary and illegal pressing of men for the army,

The pay of a common archer, during the reign of Edward I, was raised to sixpence a-day, equal to about five shillings of our money, and double that of an artificer. But, in all probability, only a very limited portion of the army was paid at this rate, for we find that Edward's army before Calais consisted of 31,004, and yet its pay for sixteen months was only L.127,000, or about five shillings per man per month. Hume conceives that "the numerous armies mentioned by histoians in those times consisted chiefly of ragamuffins who followed the camp, and lived by plunder. Soldiers,"

ays he, "were then enlisted only for a short time; they lived idle all the rest of the year, and commonly all the rest of their lives; one successful campaign, by pay and plunder, and the ransom of prisoners, was supposed to be a small fortune to a man, which was a great allurement to enter the service."

The first standing army in modern Europe was established in 1448, by Charles VII. of France, although on a very small scale. He ordered each parish to furnish an archer, and these soldiers were called franc archers, because they were exempted from taxes. This little army was raised to restore peace and order at home, not being intended for foreign aggression. Feudal soldiers received no pay, and could not be prevented from plundering,--a practice which, having become inveterate or customary, rendered them as licentious in peace as in war. Hence Charles, to leave no pretext for free quarters, levied a tax for the purpose of regularly paying his small standing army.

A.D. 1485. On the 22d August of this year, the battle of Bosworth was fought, when Henry VII. became King of England. He was crowned upon the 30th of October; "At which day," says Bacon, "as if the crown upon his head had put peril into his thoughts, he did institute, for the better security of his person, a band of fifty archers, under a captain, to attend him, by the Dame of Yeomen of his Guard; and yet, that it might be thought to be rather a matter of dignity, after the imitation of that he had known abroad, than any matter of diffidence appropriate to his own case, he made it to be understood for an ordinance, not temporary, but to hold in succession for ever after." The body guard was regarded at first as a startling innovation, and excited some jealousy and disgust among the people.

The royal army, during the great civil war, consisted chiefly of regiments raised by the nobility who espoused the cause of the king, from among their tenants and dependants; whereas the Parliamentary forces consisted principally of stipendiary troops, recruited in the large towns; but it may be presumed that both parties had recourse to every expedient which promised to be successful to recruit their respective armies. The Puritans were mostly on the side of the Parliament, because they found the bishops, by whom they had been persecuted, on the side of the king. Desiring to live peaceably, they remained at home, but were plundered by the king's soldiers, which induced many of them to abandon their habitations; and when their property was consumed, and their lives in continual danger, they passed over by thousands to the garrisons of the Parliament, and became soldiers. Charles himself assured his followers that they should meet with no enemies but traitors, most of them Brownists, Anabaptists, and Atheists, who desired to destroy both Church and State. To the ordinance of the Parliament concerning the militia, the king

opposed his Commissions of Lieutenancy; and the counties obeyed the one or the other, according as they stood affected. In many counties and towns, where the people were divided, mobbish combats and skirmishes ensued. The forces of the Parliament were at first hardly a match for those of the king, and were repeatedly, if not invariably, defeated. Cromwell soon discovered the cause of their inferiority as soldiers. "Your troops," said he to Hampden," are most of them old, decayed, serving-men and tapsters, and such kind of fellows; the king's forces are composed of gentlemen's younger sons and persons of good quality; and do you think that the mean spirits of such base and low fellows as ours will ever be able to encounter gentlemen that have honour and courage and resolution in them? You must get men who have the fear of God before them, and some conscience of what they do,-men of a spirit that is likely to go as far as gentlemen will go,--or else, I am sure, you will be beaten, as you have hitherto been, in every encounter." On this principle Cromwell acted; he began with a troop of horse, enlisting the sons of farmers and freeholders, and incorporating among these all the most zealous he could find. He soon augmented his troop of horse to a regiment. Thus was formed that iron band which charged with such resistless fury at Marston and Naseby, at Dunbar and Worcester,—“ that unconquered and unconquerable soldiery, for discipline and self-government as yet unrivalled upon earth,-to whom, though absolutely free from all the brutal vices that usually disgrace successful soldiers,-religious, sober, temperate, the dust of the most desperate battle was as the breath of life, and before whom their fiercest and proudest enemies were scattered like chaff before the wind.

In 1660 Charles II. was restored, and in the twelfth year of his reign military tenures were abolished in England. The soldiers of the three kingdoms at this time exceeded 60,000 men; and, from the scenes with which they had been long familiar, it was not supposed that they could be retained in a quiescent state. The two Houses were sensible that the reduction of this force was a work which required the utmost caution. Fair words and fair promises were addressed to the military, both by the king and the Parliament, and the disbanding of nearly forty regiments was effected without disturb ance. A small part of the military force was, however, retained, namely, Monk's regiment-the Coldstream, and a regiment of horse. In 1661 the Life Guards were raised, the men being generally gentlemen who had fought in the civil wars; the same year the Oxford Blues were embodied. To these corps were added, the 1st Royal Scots; the 2d, or Queen's; the 3d, or Old Buffs, in 1665, so called from their accoutrements being composed of buffalo leather, or, according to other authori ties, from the colour of their facings; the Scotch Fusiliers in 1678, so called from carrying the fusil, invented in France in 1630; and the 4th, or King's Own, raised in 1680. These regiments formed a force of about 5000 men, and, under the name of Guards, they became the standing army of Great Britain. Charles was of opinion that if his father had possessed a small regular force at the beginning of the civil war, he might easily have subdued the Parliament, and this conviction appears to have made him very anxious to keep up a respectable standing army.

The origin of a permanently embodied military force of any number may be dated from the commencement of this reign. It ought to be stated, however, that Parliament did not sanction the enrolment of the comparatively large army which Charles kept up, nor did it vote the money required for their maintenance. They were embodied by the authority of the Crown only, and were paid either out of the Civil List, or by diverting money voted for other purposes. On the 7th February 1674, the Commons resolved that the keeping any standing forces, other than the militia, in the nation, was a grievance.

vered, which, in spite of the presence of Ariosto's memory, he was resolved to load with praises of the house of Este; and in this tumult of pride and expectation, he beheld the duke, like one of the heroes of his poem, set out to assist the emperor against the Turks at the head of three hundred gentlemen, armed at all points, and mantled in various-coloured velvets embroidered with gold.

To complete the young poet's happiness, or commence his disappointments, he fell in love, notwithstanding the goddess he had left in Mantua, with the beautiful Lucrezia Bendidio, who does not seem, however, to have loved in return; for she became the wife of a Macchiavelli. Among his rivals was Guarini, who afterwards emulated him in pastoral poetry, and who accused him on this occasion of courting two ladies at

once.

Guarini's accusation has been supposed to refer to the Duke's sister Leonora, whose name has become so romantically mixed up with the poet's biography; but the latest inquiries render it probable that the allusion was to Laura Peperara. The young poet, however, who had not escaped the influence of the free manners of Italy, and whose senses and vanity may hitherto have been more interested than his heart, rhymed and flattered on all sides of him, not of course omitting the charms of princesses. In order to win the admiration of the ladies in a body, he sustained for three days, in public, after the fashion of the times, Fifty Amorous Conclusions; that is to say, affirmations on the subject of love; doubtless to the equal delight of his fair auditors and himself, and the creation of a good deal of jealousy and ill-will on the part of such persons of his own sex as had not wit or spirits enough for the display of so much logic and love-making.

In 1569, the death of his father, who had been made governor of Ostiglia by the Duke of Mantua, cost the loving son a fit of illness; but the continuation of his Jerusalem, an Oration spoken at the opening of the Ferrarese academy, the marriage of Leonora's sister Lucrezia with the Prince of Urbino, and the society of Leonora herself, who led the retired life of a person in delicate health, and was fond of the company of men of letters, helped to divert him from melancholy recollections; and a journey to France, at the close of the year following, took him into scenes that were not only totally new, but otherwise highly interesting to the singer of Godfrey of Boulogne. The occasion of it was a visit of the cardinal, his master, to the court of his relative, Charles the Ninth. It is supposed that his eminence went to confer with the king on matters relative to the disputes which not long afterwards occasioned the detestable massacre of St Bartholomew.

Tasso was introduced to the French king as the poet of a French hero and of a Catholic victory; and his reception was so favourable (particularly as the wretched Charles, the victim of his mother's bigotry, had himself no mean poetic feeling), that, with a rash mixture of simplicity and self-reliance (respect makes me unwilling to call it self-importance), the poet expressed an impolitic amount of astonishment at the favour shown at court to the Hugonots-little suspecting the horrible design it covered. He shortly afterwards broke with his master, the cardinal; and it is supposed that this unseasonable escape of zeal was the cause. He himself appears to have thought so. Perhaps the cardinal only wanted to get the imprudent poet back to Italy; for, on Tasso's return to Ferrara, he was not only received into the service of the duke with a salary of some fifteen golden scudi a-month, but told that he was exempted from any particular duty, and might attend in peace to his studies. Balzac affirms, that while Tasso was at the court of France, he was so poor as to beg a crown from a friend; and that, when he left it, he had the same coat on his back that he came in. The assertions of a professed wit and hyperbolist are not to be taken for

granted; yet it is difficult to say to what shifts improvidence may not be reduced.

The singer of the house of Este would now, it might have been supposed, be happy. He had leisure; he had money; he had the worldly honours that he was fond of; he occupied himself in perfecting the Jerusalem; and he wrote his beautiful pastoral, the Aminta, which was performed before the duke and his court to the delight of the brilliant assembly. The duke's sister Lucrezia, princess of Urbino, who was a special friend of the poet, sent for him to read it to her at Pesaro; and in the course of the ensuing carnival it was performed with similar applause at the court of her father-in-law. The poet had been as much enchanted by the spectacle which the audience at Ferrara presented to his eyes, as the audience with the loves and graces with which he enriched their stage.

These were the happiest days the poet ever experienced; but alas! they were, like all happiness, short and fleeting. It is evident, from all the accounts of his biographers, that in the extremely sensitive frame of the poet there lurked the disease of insanity-hence his impatience of criticism-his irritability-his suspicions, and the unsettled impulse to wandering which continually possessed him. His Jerusalem being now finished, he transmitted it to Rome with a view of its being printed, but here it was "mercilessly criticized for two years by the bigots and hypocrites of the court." He left Ferrara and went to Rome, where the kindness and patronage of Cardinal Ferdinand de' Medici only excited his suspicions-he, soon returned to Ferrara. At this time his malady seems to have come to a crisis.

lle be

He had lent an acquaintance the key of his rooms at court; and he suspected this person of opening cabinets containing his papers. Remonstrating with him one day in the court of the palace, either on that or some other account, the man gave him the lie. He received in return a blow on the face, and is said by Tasso to have brought a set of his kinsmen to assassinate him, all of whom the heroical poet immediately put to flight. At one time he suspected the duke of jealousy respecting the dedication of his poem, and at another, of a wish to burn it. He suspected his servants. came suspicious of the truth of his friend Gonzaga, He doubted even whether some praises addressed to him by Orazio Ariosto, the nephew of the great poet, which one would have thought would have been to him a consummation of bliss, were not intended to mystify and hurt him. At length he fancied that his persecutors had accused him of heresy to the inquisition; and, as he had gone through the metaphysical doubts, common with most men of reflection respecting points of faith, and the mysteries of creation, he feared that some indiscreet words had escaped him, giving colour to the charge. He thus beheld enemies all around him. He dreaded stabbing and poison; and one day, in some paroxysm of rage or horror, how occasioned it is not known, ran with a knife or dagger at one of the servants of the Duchess of Urbino, in her own chamber.

Alfonso upon this, apparently in the mildest and most reasonable manner, directed that he should be confined to his apartments, and put into the hands of the physician. These unfortunate events took place in the summer of 1577, and in the poet's thirty-third year.

Tasso showed so much affliction at this treatment, and at the same time bore it so patiently, that the duke took him to his beautiful country-seat of Belriguardo; where, in one of his accounts of the matter, the poet says that he treated him as a brother; but in another, he accuses him of having taken pains to make him criminate himself, and confess certain matters, real or supposed, the nature of which is a puzzle with posterity. Some are of opinion (and this is the prevailing one), that he was found guilty of being in love with the Princess Leonora, perhaps of being loved by herself. Others think the love out of the question, and that the

duke was concerned at nothing but his endeavouring to transfer his services and his poetic reputation into the hands of the Medici. Others see in the duke's conduct nothing but that of a good master interesting himself in the welfare of an afflicted servant.

From a convent, where he had been placed at his own request, the poor distracted poet,, looking upon every one with suspicion, at last made his escape.

He selected the loneliest ways he could find, and directed his course to the kingdom of Naples, where his sister lived. He was afraid of pursuit; he probably had little money; and considering his ill health and his dread of the inquisition, it is pitiable to think what he may have endured while picking his long way through the back states of the Church, and over the mountains of Abruzzo, as far as the Gulf of Naples. For better security, he exchanged clothes with a shepherd; and as he feared even his sister at first, from doubting whether she still loved him, his interview with her was in all its circumstances painfully dramatic. Cornelia Tasso, now a widow, with two sons, was still residing at Sorrento, where the poet, casting his eyes around him as he proceeded towards the house, must have beheld with singu lar feelings of wretchedness the lovely spots in which he had been a happy little boy. He did not announce himself at once. He brought letters, he said, from the lady's brother; and it is affecting to think, that whether his sister might or might not have retained otherwise any personal recollection of him since that time (for he had not seen her in the interval), his disguise was completed by the alterations which sorrow had made in his appearance. For, at all events, she did not know him. She saw in him nothing but a haggard stranger who was acquainted with the writer of the letters, and to whom they referred for particulars of the risk which her brother ran, unless she could afford him her protection. These particulars were given by the stranger with all the pathos of the real man, and the loving sister fainted away. On her recovery, the visitor said what he could to reassure her, and then by degrees discovered himself. Cornelia welcomed him in the tenderest manner. She did all that he desired; and gave out to her friends that the gentleman was a cousin from Bergamo, who had come to Naples on family affairs.

For a little while, the affection of his sister, and the beauty and freshness of Sorrento, rendered the mind of Tasso more easy; but his restlessness returned. He feared he had mortally offended the Duke of Ferrara; and, with his wonted fluctuation of purpose, he now wished to be restored to his presence for the very reason he had run away from it. He did not know with what vengeance he might be pursued. He wrote to the duke; but received no answer. The Duchess of Urbino was equally silent. Leonora alone responded, but with no encouragement. These appearances only made him the more anxious to dare or to propitiate his doom; and he accordingly determined to put himself in the duke's hands. His sister entreated him in vain to alter his resolution. He quitted her before the autumn was over; and, proceeding to Rome, went directly to the house of the duke's agent there, who, in concert with the Ferrarese ambassador, gave his master advice of the circumstance. Gonzaga, however, and another good friend, Cardinal Albano, doubted whether it would be wise in the poet to return to Ferrara under any circumstances. They counselled him to be satisfied with being pardoned at a distance, and with having his papers and other things returned to him; and the two friends immediately wrote to the duke requesting as much. The duke apparently acquiesced in all that was desired; but he said that the illness of his sister, the Duchess of Urbino, delayed the procuration of the papers, which, it seems, were chiefly in her hands. The upshot was, that the papers did not come; and Tasso, with a mixture of rage and fear, and perhaps for more reasons than he has told, became uncontrollably desirous of retracing the

rest of his steps to Ferrara. Love may have been among these reasons-probably was; though it does not follow that the passion must have been for a princess. The poet now, therefore, petitioned to that effect; and Alfonso wrote again, and said he might come, but only on condition of his again undergoing the ducal course of medicine; adding, that if he did not, he was to be finally expelled his highness's territories.

He was graciously received-too graciously, it would seem, for his equanimity; for it gave him such a flow of spirits, that the duke appears to have thought it necessary to repress them. The unhappy poet, at this, began to have some of his old suspicions; and the unaccountable detention of his papers confirmed them. He made an effort to keep the suspicions down, but it was by means, unfortunately, of drowning them in wine and jollity; and this gave him such a fit of sickness as had nearly been his death. He recovered, only to make a fresh stir about his papers, and a still greater one about his poems in general, which, though his Jerusalem was yet only known in manuscript, and not even his Aminta published, he believed ought to occupy the attention of mankind. People at Ferrara, therefore, not foreseeing the respect that posterity would entertain for the poet, and having no great desire perhaps to encourage a man who claimed to be a rival of their countryman Ariosto, now began to consider their Neapolitan guest not merely an ingenious and pitiable, but an overweening and tiresome enthusiast. The court, however, still seemed to be interested in its panegyrist, though Tasso feared that Alfonso meant to burn his Jerusalem. Alfonso, on the other hand, is supposed to have feared that he would burn it himself, and the ducal praises with it. The papers, at all events, apparently including the only fair copy of the poem, were constantly withheld; and Tasso, in a new fit of despair, again quitted Ferrara

He again takes a wandering fit, and again returns, but his extravagance becomes so great that the duke, who really seems to have acted a kind and considerate part, was at last obliged to send him to a place of confinement, the Hospital of St Anne. Here the poet lived seven long years.

Tasso enabled himself to endure his imprisonment with composition. He supported it with his poetry and his poem, and what, alas! he had been too proud of during his liberty, the praises of his admirers. His genius brought him gifts from princes, and some money from the booksellers: it supported him even against his critics. During his confinement the Jerusalem Delivered was first published; though, to his grief, from a surreptitious and mutilated copy. But it was followed by a storm of applause; and if this was succeeded by as great a storm of objection and controversy, still the healthier part of his faculties were roused, and he exasperated his critics and astonished the world by showing how coolly and learnedly the poor, wild, imprisoned genius could discuss the most intricate questions of poetry and philosophy. The disputes excited by his poem are generally supposed to have done him harm; but the conclusion appears to be ill founded. They diverted his thoughts, and made him conscious of his powers and his fame. I doubt whether he would have been better for entire approbation; it would have put him in a state of elevation, unfit for what he had to endure. He had found his pen his great solace, and he never employed it so well. It would be incredible what a heap of things he wrote in this complicated torment of imprisonment, sickness, and "physic," if habit and mental activity had not been sufficient to account for much greater wonders. His letters to his friends and others would make a good-sized volume; those to his critics, another; sonnets and odes, a third; and his dialogues after the manner of Plato, two more. Perhaps a good half of all he wrote was written in this hospital of St Anne; and he studied as well as composed, and had to read all that was written at the time, pro and con, in

the discussions about his Jerusalem, which, in the latest edition of his works, amount to three out of six volumes octavo! Many of the occasions, however, of his poems, as well as letters, are most painful to think of, their object having been to exchange praise for money. And it is distressing, in the letters, to see his other little wants, and the fluctuations and moods of his mind. Now he is, angry about some books not restored, or some gift promised and delayed. Now he is in want of some books to be lent him; now of some praise to comfort him; now of a little fresh linen. He is very thankful for visits, for respectful letters, for "sweetmeats;" and greatly puzzled to know what to do with the bad sonnets and panegyrics that are sent him. They were sometimes too much even for the allowed ultra courtesies of Italian acknowledgment. His compliments to most people are varied with astonishing grace and ingenuity; his accounts of his condition often sufficient to bring the tears into the manliest eyes.

A playful address to a cat, to lend him her eyes to write by during some hour in which he happened to be without a light (for it does not appear to have been de nied him), may be taken as more probable evidence of a mind relieved at the moment, though the necessity for the relief may have been very sad. But the style in which he generally alludes to his situation is far different. He continually begs his correspondents to pity him, to pray for him, to attribute his errors to infirmity. He complains of impaired memory, and acknowledges that he has become subject to the deliriums formerly attributed to him by the enemies that had helped to produce them.

At length, in 1586, at the entreaty of the Prince of Mantua, Tasso was permitted to leave his place of confinement, and go to reside at the court of Mantua. Here he lived, caressed and respected by his father's former friends, but unfortunately the same diseased pride, and suspicion, and restlessness, again seized him, and instigated other wanderings, a sufficient proof of the real cause of his former confinement. From Mantua he went to Naples, in the vicinity of which he resided for some time in comparative tranquillity, but quitted it also for Rome. He now wandered about from place to place, soothed by the attentions of friends and patrons,

but still haunted by the visions and excitements of a disordered intellect. His friend and biographer, Manso, relates a scene which he witnessed with him, in which he was evidently labouring under the curious, but not uncommon, impression of viewing spectral illusions. At last, worn out, he died in the monastery of St Onofrio, on 25th April 1575, just at the time when, after the custom of the age, he was to have been crowned with laurel in the capitol-when the pope had also granted him a pension, and he had received, after a tedious lawsuit, his mother's patrimony. Poor illustrious Tasso! weak enough to warrant pity from his inferiors-great enough to overshadow in death his once-fancied superiors.

Manso has left a minute account of his friend's person and manners. He was tall even among the tall; had a pale complexion, sunken cheeks, lightish brown hair, head bald at the top, large blue eyes, square forehead, big nose inclining towards the mouth, lips pale and thin, white teeth, delicate white hands, long arms, broad chest and shoulders, legs rather strong than fleshy, and the body altogether better proportioned than in good condition; the result, nevertheless, being an aspect of manly beauty and expression, particularly in the countenance, the dignity of which marked him for an extraordinary person, even to those who did not know him. His demeanour was grave and deliberate; he laughed seldom; and though his tongue was prompt, his delivery was slow; and he was accustomed to repeat his last words. He was expert in all manly exercises, but not equally graceful; and the same defect attended his otherwise striking eloquence in public assemblies. His putting to flight the assassins in Ferrara gave him such a reputation for courage, that there went about in his honour a popular couplet:

For the sword as well as pen Tasso is the man of men.

He was a little eater, but not averse to wine, particularly such as combined piquancy with sweetness; and he always dressed in black.

Manso's account is still more particular, and yet it does not tell all; for Tasso himself informs us that he stammered, and was near-sighted; and a Neapolitan writer who knew him adds to the near-sightedness.some visible defect in the eyes.

Ir is conjectured that at one period about 2,000,000 of Indians were scattered over the vast continent of North America, and now their numbers are not supposed to exceed 200,000. On the settlement of the British in the States, the tribes on those territories were gradually driven to the westward. The Narrag hausetts inhabited Rhode Island; the tribes of the Massachussetts, the Pantuckets, and the Pokanokets, were scattered over New England; the Mohawks and the five nations inhabited the state of New York; the Creeks, the Yamassees and Cherokees, possessed Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia; the Shawanees and Delawares the Ohio territory. Towards the far west are the Killamucks, Clatsops, Chinooks, and Cathlanacks. Some of the ancient tribes are now blended together, and many are totally extinct.

The general characteristics of the North American Indian are a reddish copper colour of the skin— features regular-hair dark, long, and rather thinthe forehead rather retreating-the crown of the occiput elevated-the form is muscular, rarely fat. The eastern and middle tribes have well-proportioned bodies-many have the Roman and aquiline nose, and much of the regularity of features of a European. Those

INDIANS.

towards the far west, on the Mississippi, and on the shores of the great continent, are reported not to be of such exact symmetry. The features of the Sioux are repulsive. The Killamucks, Clatsops, Chinooks, and neighbouring tribes, are of diminutive stature, ill shaped, and their general appearance by no means prepossessing. They have broad, thick, flat feet, tlrick ankles, crooked legs, ascribed to squatting on the calves or heels, and the too tight bandages, or strings of beads, on the ankles, especially of the females. The colour of their skin is rather lighter than that of the Indians of the Missouri. Their lips are thick,-mouth wide and large, nose of moderate size, wide and fleshy at the base, with wide nostrils,-the colour of the eyes is black, brown, and yellow. The forehead of all the tribes west of the rocky mountains is flattened by art-it appears, therefore, peculiarly flat and wide. To the east, however, this practice is unknown. The hair of both sexes is parted at the top of the head, and falls loosely and uncurled behind the ears.

The general character of the American Indian is that of a sedate and grave stoicism. Washington Irvine shrewdly remarks, however, that this character is only maintained before strangers. and that when alone they