made such a. clearance of the foe in double-quick
time. It was upon her archers that
our Queen Elizabeth relied; though, as
visitors to Dover Castle are aware, she had
her own "pocket-pistols"—the sixty-pounder
at Dover Castle, which carries a ball seven
miles, being so called. Gunpowder had then
been in use in war, on our own soil, full two
centuries; yet was the bow the favourite
weapon, from the sovereign to the peasant.
Names of honour, or of fondness, were lavished
on cannon. The Portuguese named theirs
after their saints; Louis the Twelfth, of
France, christened his after peers of his
realm; the Emperor Charles the Fifth had
a dozen choice pieces, which he called his
Twelve Apostles. At Bremen, there are two
named Messengers of Bad News; others are
called the Thunderer, the Terrible, the Devil,
and, as we have seen, the Queen's Pocket-
pistol. But the yearnings of warrior hearts
were still towards the bow.

These firearms were so dreadfully
unwieldy!—not only the cannon, but the musket.
In 1520, and onwards—when the musket was
first used—the soldier who had to wield it
must often have wished it had never been
devised. It was all very well to rest it on
the wall of a town, and fire it at leisure
against the foe beneath; but when it came
to such an arm being carried into the field,
it might easily be found that only men of
extraordinary size and strength could manage
it. The gun itself was so heavy, that the
soldier could not raise and point it; he must
have something to rest it upon. That
something was a "fork," the handle of which was
shod with iron, and pointed, that it might
stand firm in the ground; and, when it was
found that the soldier was liable to attack
while reloading, the "rest" was armed with
a spike, either projecting from one prong, or
thrown out from the staff by a spring—these
"Swedish Feathers," as they were called,
keeping the enemy from charging till the
gun was ready for another explosion. This
"rest" had to be carried by the musketeer,
or an attendant; and the match must be
looked to. The match was not heavy, but it
was a rather anxious affair. It was a piece
of prepared hemp, loosely twisted, and with
a creeping and smouldering fire always in it.
Sometimes it was carried in a tin tube, bored
with holes; but oftener in the pocket, and
oftenest between the head and its covering,
which was the place most strongly
recommended by those who had not to carry it
themselves. Then, there was the ammunition.
A soldier was usually furnished with
twelve charges of powder; and these were
put into twelve little boxes, of wood, tin, or
leather, which were fastened to the belt that
crossed his left shoulder. There was nothing
very feather-like in this load; and this is the
burden that was carried by the soldiers of
Charles the First and Cromwell.

There was a stronger objection to the use
of these muskets than even their weight.
Good aim was out of the question with them;
and in this was the arrow again regretted.
It was not only that firing off this musket was
such slow work that an enemy—whether in
siege or battle—was sure to have moved
before he could be hit; it was also that it
would have been difficult to hit him if he
had stood stock-still to be shot. The objection
belonged, and it belongs still, to muskets
of every sort, however much improved in the
firelock in lightness, and by the introduction
of cartridge-boxes in the place of bandoleers.
The difficulty is this. It is found impossible
to fit any ball so precisely to any musket-barrel,
as that it shall not, in passing out, rub
more against one side of the barrel than the
other. It thus leaves the muzzle with some
inclination, however little, to the right or left,
or up or down; and the impulse is sometimes
in one direction, sometimes in another. Moreover,
the divergence increases at a vast rate
with every foot of distance. Thus, there
seems to be no great use in taking aim with
a musket; and the mischief done by it in
war, is pretty much a matter of chance. It
was found that a musket properly charged,
as far as the powder was concerned, but with
a bullet too small for the bore, made quite
noise enough, but shot nothing; light being
thus thrown on the secret by which certain
cunning persons successfully pretended to be
invulnerable. It was also ascertained that of all
rare things, the rarest was, to find a ball and
a bore that so accurately fitted each other, as
that the ball went where it was meant to go.
It followed that the thing to be attended to
was to make the bore and the ball fit each
other. Out of this question arose the rifle, of
which at present we are hearing so much
talk. It was known that an arrow feathered
in a spiral line, whirls as it flies, and goes
straight and strong to its mark. It was
considered that if this quality of the arrow could
be imparted to the balls of firearms, such a
weapon would be the best ever devised for
warfare with an enemy anywhere within
sight. This has been done; not to perfection,
by any means, but so far as to change
essentially the character of warfare. What
the method is, will appear in the course of
our account of what we have just been seeing
of the manufacture and proving of firearms
at Birmingham;—at Birmingham, where,
during the last war, muskets were made at
the rate of more than one in a minute, every
working day. The rate of manufacture was
a thousand a day of finished muskets, and
two thousand a week of muskets made in
parts, and sent to be finished in London and
Dublin.

One day last week we took shelter from a
shower, under the gateway of a timber-yard,
which at once struck us as being unlike any
other timber-yard we remembered to have
seen. There were some few squared trunks
of trees; but most of the wood was cut into