1827.] 



Domestic and Foreign. 



299 



enchanted with. The province has been 

 sadly devastated by the war ; but 

 there are still forty or fifty thousand of 

 them left, in an extent of country some 

 hundred miles square. On the king's birth- 

 day, Captain Andrews, in return for the 

 abundant civilities he met with, gave a 

 dinner, and a ball in the evening to the 

 ladies ; in all which he was ably seconded 

 by one Mr. George Brown, whom he 

 drolly describes, in the O'Connel style, as 

 a " fine specimen of an Englishman, both 

 in respect to personal and mental endow- 

 ments." In praise of these Tucumans he 

 keeps no manner of measure. He attends 

 the Sala, the House of Assembly of the 

 province : 



The style of debate (says he) was not as I ob- 

 served it at some other places. The members did 

 not deliver their sentiments sitting. The orator, 

 having gained the eye of the president or speaker, 

 advanced in front and addressed himself to the 

 chair, standing much as in our House of Commons, 

 and with an air of independence and frankness 

 very agreeable to an Englishman's notions of free- 

 dom in debate. One of the members, an advocate, 

 was the most able of the opponents of government. 

 He spoke with a boldness and vehemence, that 

 very strongly reminded me of Fox ; but he dis- 

 played infinitely more grace of manner, and a finer 

 intonation than that great orator. I shall never 

 lose the figure of this wiry gray-headed old man, 

 whose coarse hair seemed to erect itself like 

 bristles, while employed in thundering his denun- 

 ciations against the executive. The nerve and 

 force of his rapid delivery were finely contrasted 

 with the easy, elegant, and persuasive manner of 

 Dr. Molino, who answered him with arguments 

 rather than declamation, and with an ease and 

 self-command not to be exceeded in any European 

 assembly. I observed several other members of 

 very considerable power as speakers, and fit to 

 rank with the first order in any senate, &c. 



And when he quits the country, it is in 

 these ecstatic terms: 



Farewell, delicious Tucuman, and hospitable 

 Tucumaneses ; farewell to your delightful plains, 

 and mighty and romantic mountains! Though 

 Englishmen are not to be your brothers in your 

 country's bosom, there is one Englishman, who 

 will ever bear towards you the kindly feelings of a 

 brother, and desire your prosperity and happiness. 



Though thinking Captain Andrews a 

 little too ardent for sober admiration, we 

 are well pleased with his book have ac- 

 companied him throughout in his tour, 

 without weariness and should be ready 

 at any time to set out again somewhere 

 else under his guidance ; and we heartily 

 wish him better luck in his next under- 

 taking. 



The Military Sketch Book. 2 vols. 

 12mo.; 1827. These are rather amusing 

 volumes. The writer is a good clever 

 sort of person, and dashes off a descrip- 

 tion lightly and readily, where the cir- 



cumstances are all placed plain before 

 him, or press forcibly upon him ; but, 

 from want of tact, or perhaps mere want 

 of experience, he does not always know 

 what will fell, and of course often falls 

 short of his mark. His attempts at hu- 

 mour are miserably ineffective, and as to 

 his niess-lable chat, of which there are no 

 less than four sketches, good lord deliver 

 us from such vapidity such absolute 

 inanity both from the reality and the de- 

 scription of it. The guard-room sketches 

 are all of them better, and the gossip of 

 the men something like that of rational 

 animals. Among them is the story of 

 Maria de Carmo, told by the corporal with 

 real feeling ; and there are touches of the 

 same kind scattered here and there over 

 the volumes equally felicitous in the exe- 

 cution, and thrilling in the effect. But 

 we were perhaps more struck by the 

 scenes of desolation, in the Spanish cam- 

 paigns, which the writer spreads vividly 

 before the eye ; and we are glad to place 

 some of these horrors before our readers 

 not to harass their feelings surely, but to 

 force upon their convictions the miseries 

 of war. The more general among indi- 

 viduals becomes the odium of such effects, 

 the more unwilling will the aggregate 

 the nation and consequently the rulers 

 of the nation become to plunge and pre- 

 cipitate into a renewal of war: 



After the battle of Busaco, which was fought 

 in the year following that of Talavera, the army 

 retreated over at least 150 miles of a country the 

 most difficult to pass: steep after steep was climbed 

 by division after division, until the whole arrived 

 within the lines of Torres Vedras. The whole of 

 this march, from the mountains of Busaco to the 

 lines, was a scene of destruction and misery, not 

 to the army, but to the unhappy population. 

 Every pound of corn was destroyed, the wine- 

 casks were staved, and the forage was burnt ; the 

 people in a flock trudging on before the army, to 

 shelter themselves from the French, into whose 

 hands, had they remained in their houses, they 

 must have fallen. Infants barely able to walk; 

 bedridden old people ; the sick and the dying all 

 endeavouring to make their way into Lisbon ; for 

 which purpose all the asses and mules that they 

 could find were taken with them, and the poor 

 animals became as lame as their riders by a very 

 few days' marches. It was a severe measure of 

 Lord Wellington's thus to devastate the country 

 which he left behind him, but, like the burning of 

 Moscow, it was masterly ; for Massena being thus 

 deprived of the means of supplying his army, was 

 soon obliged to retrace his steps to Spain, pursued 

 in his turn by the British, and leaving the roads 

 covered with his starving people and slaughtered 

 horses. 



Here is a mass of misery. These things 

 are kept too much out of sight. This 

 measure of Lord Wellington's was stu- 

 diously executed to distress the enemy 

 at the expense, however, of our allies; - 

 but here is another scene, occasioned by 

 2Q2 



