The Copts become artful and wily clerks;
the Berbers, grooms and running footmen; the
Thebaid people, weavers, potters, and ploughmen;
but the smart boy of Cairo, if only a
fellah's son, turns donkey-boy. He cannot fall:
he may rise. Over his handful of dates, his
bunch of onions, or his savoury soup of orange-
coloured lentils, he is happy; for he may one
day, he dreams, become a donkey-owner himself.
Then he will have a veiled wife, a pipe-bearer, a
house with a court-yard, a fountain, and an
orange-grove, and—

"Achmed, you must go to the Pyramids with
that English gentleman at Shepherd's Hotel."

The dream is broken, and off races Achmed.

REGIMENTAL BANDS.

IT would seem as if war could be no more
carried on than worship, or love-making, or
banqueting, or the sad ceremonies of death, without
music, fine or coarse. — The forms of this
have been, and are many. To name only three—
the violins of Louis the Fourteenth of France
—neither the grand band, nor the small band of
fiddlers, presided over by Lulli — which went into
action with the regiments of the Grand Monarch
—the bagpipes of the bare-legged petticoated
northmen, whose pibrochs and plumes have been
so formidable on many a foreign battle-field;—
the whoop of the Red Indians, in coarse but
real concord with the vermilion which daubs
their faces, when a scalping expedition is in
prospect. — A "band," in short, is as much an
inevitable circumstance as a firelock, or a bow and
arrows, when "conquest calls" (as the song says).
Noise has a surprising influence on the white
feather, and inspirits bravery to be thrice brave.

It is beginning to be owned, that in its
bands, as in other of its arrangements and
accoutrements, our army of England is not
altogether on a par with those of other
countries. We can show nothing to compare with
the harmony and janizary music of Germany,
north and south — of Prussia, Austria, and
Bohemia. — A stronger sensation cannot be recalled
than that produced by the serenade given by the
late King of Prussia to our sovereign, on her
entrance into Germany for the first time after
her marriage. This was held at the Palace of
Brühl, half way betwixt Cologne and Bonn.
Herr Wiprecht, the Costa among Prussian
bandmasters, had brought together a force, including
one hundred drums — the rich pompous sound
of which seemed absolutely (without metaphor)
to rend the sky, and which spread abroad to the
horizon on every side. The players, it is true,
were picked ones; nevertheless, such a squadron
of seven hundred could not, by any magic, have
been assembled in this island, — boundlessly
supplied as it is now with choristers. It was
some comfort that when the Prussians played
Rule Britannia they were not successful; but a
certain quick step, with a long foreseen and
gradually prepared explosion of sound at its
close, was, without exception, the most inspiriting
piece of open-air music which the ears of the
writer have ever heard. — The same ears bear
grateful remembrance of the band of the Baden
regiment that in Mozart's town of Salzburg, on
a certain August evening, played Mozart's airs
from his Magic Flute, with a taste, and a tone,
and a ripe musical sense, such as our Coldstream,
or First Life Guards, or Royal Marines, cannot
boast — not altogether owing its superiority to
the association of the locality. So, again, in
Venice, when the music was heard after the
coarse singing in the Fenice Theatre, and the
cracked minstrelsy of the ballad-mongers (shame
and sorrow to Italy) before the Caffè Florian,
not the most bitter patriotic impatience of the
Austrian hoof, triumphing in St. Mark's Place,
could resist the charm of the rich voluptuous
waltz music of Strauss and Labitsky, streaming
forth from the well-assorted flutes, horns,
clarionets, oboes, and trumpets, or other pipes, the
players of which combined so excellently that
the band became as one artist, delivering a sweet
and exciting melody, without a flawed, or faltering,
or feeble note in his voice.

The French speciality in military music — at
least in days more recent than those of the fighting
fiddlers of Montespan's purchaser, and
Maintenon's tamed husband — was that of drumming.
Rhythmical noise is our neighbours' delight.
They cannot cheer (who can?) as Britons do;
but they are wonderful in tramping; — and the
r-r-roll of their trim little soldiers going the
round, with its smart cheery briskness, has
made many a lonely traveller feel less lonely in
one of those drowsy, crumbling, fortified country
towns, the quaint individuality of which has, till
lately, been too much overlooked — while in Paris
it has frightened over her dinner many a timid
old woman of both sexes, strange to the capital,
but having brought there a fixed idea of
Charlotte Corday, the guillotine, and never-ending-
still-beginning barricades, as constant features
of French life, rule, and governance, and
disorder. The French military bands have,
however, essentially improved during the last dozen
years. They are now wondrously sweet, precise,
and spirited, though they will never, it may be
fancied, equal those of Germany, and of England
even, in splendour of tone (an essential in
open-air music), for two reasons. — First, the
French seem organically indifferent to the charms
of full sweet sound, as distinct from strong
noise. They tolerate and enjoy, as singers,
artists whom we hardly recognise as possessing
voices, for the sake of their intelligence, accent,
and finish. — Secondly, certain official measures,
carried with the paternal view of throwing a
monopoly of instrument-making into one or two
hands (howsoever skilful these hands be), must
have for result a mechanical, if not a meagre,
monotony. Contrast in qualities of sound is a large
ingredient in picturesque effect. — A band is not
like a battalion, for the use of which coats,
shakos, and knapsacks are only good, insomuch
as they display uniformity in material and facture.
Let there be as much drilling and manœuvring
as is possible in preparing its evolutions — a band,