he drew towards him a silver candlestick,
drew from it the wax candle, threw it up
over his head, so as to describe a double
summersault, which it did so accurately as
to return into the candlestick; then, while his
audience were still staring with amazement,
the silent man rose, drew back his chair a
few paces, leaped high into the air, turned
head over heels, and fell into his seat on the
chair without moving a muscle of his face.
The man. in black was indeed no other than
Debureau, the renowned mountebank of the
Funambules, and I need not say that he spoilt
the learned theological discussion for that
evening.

In like manner my vagabond thoughts have
been turning head over heels in the Merry
Andrew fashion, and the awful solemnity
of Napoleon reviewing his spectral braves,
gives place to vulgar notions of sealed patterns,
regulation coatees, felt helmets, shell jackets
versus tunics, the virtues and vices of gold
and worsted lace, the weight of knapsacks,
the circular or conical form of bullets, the
abominations of stocks and shoulder belts,
the cloth-yard, the sleeve-board, and the
tailor's goose. Mars in his aspects of fire,
famine, and slaughter, is entirely superseded
by Mars à la mode.

The only midnight review I can picture to
myself, in my present frame of mind, is a
phantasm which, when one of those clothing-
board members or army tailors lays his head
on his bolster at night, might rise before him
after the vexed discussions of the day. All
the absurdities and variations of centuries
of military fashion might troop past his bed
to the rough music of thimbles and shears.
The Roman legionary with his casque and
buckler, his spear and lambrequins; the
sergeant of Queen Boadicea's body-guard,
with his knotted club, and mantle of skins,
the rest of his body naked, and stained with
woad, dark blue, in a neat but not gaudy
manner; the kernes and gallowglasses of
General Macbeth; the shock-headed woollen-
clad Saxons; the half-naked, golden collar
and bracelet bedizened hordes of Canute the
Dane; the trim-shaven Normans, with registered
shirts of mail; men at arms with
morions, battle-axes, curtal-axes, maces,
arbalests, pikemen, javelin men; archers in Kendal
green, with their cloth-yard shafts;
Elizabethan arquebusiers, with tin-pot helmets,
and small-clothes stuffed out to a preternatural
size; Cromwellian troopers with buff
coats, bandoliers, and Bibles; Life Guards,
in slouched hats and feathers, periwigs, laced
cravats, and boots like buckets; in shovel
hats, three-cornered hats, cocked hats, "coach-
wheel " hats, cocked hats again, muff caps,
helmets with tops like mutton-chops, German
silver helmets with white, red, and black
plumes; in jack boots, gaiters, Wellington
boots, and jack boots again; in Ramilies wigs,
bob-wigs, pigtails, powder, and their natural
hair, The infantry of the line with caps of every
imaginable form: like porringers, like candle
boxes, like beer-warmers, like Chinese
pagodas, like pint pots, like flower-pots: with
epaulettes, successively like ornamental bell-
pulls, like frogs turned pale and in convulsions,
like swollen sausages, like mops without
the handles, like balls of Berlin wool without
the crochet needle, like muffins fringed round
their circumference: in coats single-breasted,
double-breasted, pigeon-breasted; with waist-
bands, now just below the arm-pits, now just
above the knees; with long tails, short tails,
tails turned back, tails turned forward, and no
tails. In pipeclayed smalls, and successively
in short, long, tight and loose trousers: in half
gaiters, in short gaiters, and in long gaiters with
fifty or sixty buttons to button and unbutton
per diem: in half boots, whole boots, and ankle-
jacks; in buckled shoes, clasped shoes, and
laced shoes. In all manners of belts, straps,
stocks, tags, loops, tassels, fringes, furbelows,
stars, stripes, flourishes, scrolls, peaks, laps,
facings, edgings, snippings, and crimpings;
now with " a sleeve like a demi-cannon," here
up and down, carved like an apple- tart there,
slish and slash, like to a censer in a barber's
shop. What would all Napoleon's reviews be
to that British parade of the ghosts of bygone
fashions; of spectral pipeclay, of hair powder
deceased, of heelball tottering, of cross-belts
moribund, of stocks dead? A sort of galop
infernal of past and present helmets, shakos,
coatees, knapsacks, belts, boots, and
epaulettes, would seem to pass before the dazzled
eyes of the arbiter of military costume. I
do not myself wonder much at the indecision
which has prevailed, and at the delay which
has arisen in the choice of a new costume for
the army. Mars has been à la mode in so
many different shapes; he has been so
frequently nipped and snipped, patched, sewn-
up, and taken to pieces again, that it does
not cost the imagination much to figure him
standing now and then, like the old caricature
of the contemplating Englishman, naked,
with a pair of shears beside him, in dire
uncertainty as to what dress he shall wear
next.

Among the many themes for wonderment
and meditation which a sight of the great
old Duke of Wellington used, in his
lifetime, always to afford me, was the
thought of the immense variety of uniforms
the brave old man must have worn during
his lifetime. For the Duke, be it remembered,
was always in the fashion, and, within
a week of his death, was the best-dressed
gentleman in England. Yet in his first ensigncy
he must have worn hair-powder and a pig-
tail, a cocked hat as large as a beadle's, silver
bell-pull epaulettes, tights like a rope-dancer,
and ankle-jacks not unlike those of a dustman.
The Duke of Wellington in a pigtail
and ankle-jacks! Can you reconcile that
regulation costume of the subaltern in the
Thirty-third Foot with the hessian boots
and roll-collar of Talavera: the gray