62 Notes for the Month, [JULY, 



every officer of the navy, but whk>) only attaches in the army to offi- 

 cers of a rank to which purchase gives no access. We allow officers 

 in the army to purchase up to a lieutenant-colonelcy : an officer in the 

 navy would be allowed to purchase up to a post-captaincy : and here the 

 power of purchase, on both sides, would cease. But, whatever apparent 

 equality there may be in the rank, there is no parity at all in the degrees 

 of trust and authority, which we should be allowing the parties in the 

 two services, by their money, to become possessed of; for the post-captain 

 of a frigate or even the master and commander, who commands a gun- 

 brig or a sloop these persons are placed in situations constantly, where 

 their power is as absolute, as paramount, and as free from all guidance of 

 superior authority, direction, or control not as the power (in the army) 

 of a captain or of a lieutenant-colonel but of a general officer entrusted 

 with the command of twenty thousand men. It very seldom happens, in 

 the army, that a major, or other officer at the head of a regiment, acts 

 independently, for any length of time, and upon his own command. His 

 regiment forms part of a brigade, which is commanded by a brigadier-gene- 

 ral ; who, in his turn, is commanded by the general of division ; whose move- 

 ments are again directed and controlled by the commander-in-chief of the 

 forces. But the commander of a ship of war though but of a third or 

 fourth-rate the moment his anchor is up, is, half his time, an independent 

 agent. It sometimes happens that his ship forms part of a fleet, but quite as 

 often that a particular duty is singly and specifically committed to him. 

 Brigs of war, if we recollect right, are commanded by officers who have 

 the rank of lieutenants in the navy ; this rank is equal to that of a captain 

 in the army. But, although there may be no great mischief in allowing a 

 raw man, by money, to obtain the latter commission, where no duty of 

 difficulty or nicety will devolve upon him, and no duty at all in the per- 

 formance of which he will not be subject, five or six deep, to control and 

 surveillance, yet it would be a little too much to allow an individual no 

 better qualified to take upon himself the entire command and disposal of 

 a ship of war and her crew with all that despotic authority which is 

 claimed and exercised by the commanders of vessels of war at sea and tho 

 onus of maintaining for us that reputation for superior skill and talent in the 

 naval service, which is so deeply important to the honour and interests of the 

 country. There are other objections, and numerous ones, to the system 

 of selling commissions in the navy, into which our limits do not enable us 

 at this moment to go. But it is whimsical to observe how liable our views 

 of practicability and policy are to be guided by our personal convenience. 

 The use of the impress system has been defended in preference to the 

 system of bounties and enlistment in the navy, upon the plea that the 

 service required peculiar men sailors of skill and experience whom 

 money could not purchase : and now we discover that money may be a fit 

 and admitted circumstance of qualification, in the selection of the officers 

 by whom these sailors, whom money, cannot purchase, are to be com- 

 manded ! 



A Morning Paper notices, as a matter of surprise, that " a corps of 

 artillery" has arrived from Dublin at Woolwich, in the short space of 

 seven days. The journalist's statement as to the time is correct ; but his 

 surprise is the effect of inadvertence ; he does not perceive that the corps 

 which has made this rapid transit, is a corps of the " Flying Artillery." 



A Complete Outfit. The haberdashers in Cornhill aud Fenchurch- 



