save men struck with the black one. Other
pundits maintain with equal erudition,
that the plague is not represented by one
spirit, but by many. This dispute has
often waxed warm; but, up to the present
time, the wise men of the East have not come
to a decision. Indeed they do not love
decisions, or decisive people.

I do not know that I have anything
more to say about the Regular Turk this
evening. He is a strange weary, broken-down,
cranky, rickety, crotchety old person whose
beginning, end, and whole history may be
summed up in two words—pipes and peace.

REVOLVERS.

THE effect of the first firing of a gun in
the presence of astonished savages is always
an interesting point in the narratives of old
voyages of discovery; but, setting aside the
fire, and the smoke, and the loud report, it
was, at an early period, found out that guns
—at all events those guns in use when Captain
Cook sailed round the world were—after
all, not very terrible engines.

History cannot tell of a time when men did
not make bows and arrows; and it is no
more than seventy-eight years ago since
Benjamin Franklin—who had that kind of mind
which is not always satisfied with received
opinions—gravely recommended the American
patriots, then at war with King George's troops,
to return to the very weapons that were carried
by Ishmael the son of Abraham. Bows and
arrows, he said, were good weapons, and not
wisely laid aside: first, because a man may
shoot as truly with a bow as with a common
musket; secondly, because he can discharge
four arrows in the time of charging and
discharging one bullet; thirdly, because his
object is not obscured from his view by the
smoke of his own comrades; fourthly, because a
flight of arrows seen coming upon them
terrifies and disturbs the enemy's attention
to his business; fifthly because an arrow
sticking in any part of a man disables him
until it is extracted; and sixthly, because
bows and arrows are more easily
provided everywhere than muskets and
ammunition. Thirty thousand Frenchmen fell
at Crecy, mostly pierced by the arrows and
bolts of the English and of their Genoese
auxiliaries; and old French chroniclers attest the
terror and confusion which the English
archers always produced in the enemy's
ranks. There was a time—before British
sovereigns had an army or even a respectable
body-guard at command—when not only A
was an archer, and shot at a frog; but when
C, D, and all the other letters of the
alphabet, were archers, and shot at everybody
and everything that could stand for a
mark; from frogs to sovereigns. Consequently
sovereigns, when tempted to visit their
subjects' pockets without consulting their
refractory commons, were induced to
consider that propensity, and to modify their
determination accordingly.

But that is all gone by now. It is all
dwindled down into a few Toxophilite
Clubs, whose members wear Lincoln
green and black cocks' feathers; being very
harmless ladies and gentlemen, who only hurt
each other by accident at pretty archery
fêtes. Great prelates no longer exhort their
hearers to the diligent practice of archery.
Princes have ceased to pride themselves on
striking the bull's eye at two hundred and
forty yards, or to command their sheriffs to
visit all the live geese in their respective
counties, and compel them to shed six good
feathers each for the shafts of arrows. All
the old Doubles are dead who would have
clapped i' the clout at twelve score; and carried
you a forehand shaft a fourteen or a fourteen
and a half, that it would have done a man's
heart good to see. Political economists of
these days do not insist that every butt of
Malmsey or Tyre wine shall come accompanied
by ten good bow staves. The age of
archery is fled, and no force of reasoning of
even fifty-Franklin power could bring it
back again.

The struggle between bows and guns
was long, and at one time doubtful.
Indeed, when we remember the clumsy
and inefficient nature of the earliest specimens
of portable fire-arms, it is easier to
understand the opposition which they met
with from warriors of conservative principles,
than to account for their ever having been
adopted. Weapons intended to be destructive,
but really more harmless than those which our
soldiers carried even in the last war, it would
be difficult to imagine. It is said that each
soldier fired away his own weight in lead
for every man that he hit. There is a proverb
that says every bullet finds its billet;
but if that means that every bullet finds its
man, it is not true of more than one in eight
hundred; for, in the desultory warfare at the
Cape Colony, it is calculated that every wounded
Caffre cost us three thousand two hundred
balls. Bows and arrows could hardly have
done less damage than this, I think.

The British firelock—fitted with percussion
caps, and otherwise improved—is still in the
hands of the bulk of our troops, but it is now
condemned by the oldest of the old school
of warriors. It will kill if levelled at masses
of men quite close, and so would a shower of
bricks and stones, which would not be so
liable to strike the ground before it strikes
the object, nor to fly to right or left of it,
nor over it, as a musket bullet is.
Barbarian tribes in Hindostan, and naked
savages at the Cape, were not so slow
as the authorities at home, or even as officers
in action, in finding out what a miserable
weapon for defence Brown Bess is. With the
Caffres it was long a favourite sport to
provoke sentries, or small bodies of troops, to
fire; then, rushing forward, to wrest the