438 The Club Room. [Amu,, 



Time alone the tale will tell, 

 Whether in a dungeon's cell, 

 Whether in a desart isle, 

 Whether in a royal pile, 

 Shall that model yet be seated ; 

 Whether curst, and feared, and hated, 

 By what doom of guilty fame, 

 Shall be smote that model's name. 

 But the world still rolls along ; 

 Fools beget a foolish throng ; 

 Blockheads, only made for slaves 

 Blockheads, native prey of knaves ! 



Chorus. 



Double, double ! earth's a bubble ! 

 Trimming is no sort of trouble ! 



SCANDAL. 



Now the charm is featly wound, 

 Take to scoundrels above ground 

 Soon to be your nearer neighbours 

 Take your mischief-making labours ! 

 On the types the paper lay, 

 Black enough to cloud the day ; 

 Then speed it on your wings unfurled, 

 And spread the poison through the world ! 



THE CAPTAIN OF RIFLES.* 



THERE have been half a dozen narratives of the 'ad ventures of a 

 young Rifleman, an old Rifleman, a French Rifleman, a German, and 

 so forth. And they have all had some claim on public interest ; for of 

 all the eccentricities of a soldier's life, the Rifleman takes by right the 

 first share. 



But of all those self-historians our Captain of Rifles tells his tale the 

 best, for he is a remarkably pleasant fellow ; he takes the world's 

 roughnesses with the gayest nonchalance, and has a natural fund of 

 humour, which is by no means the worse for its being perfectly in the 

 camp style. His book has one fault, the rarest fault in books, it is too 

 short. For we feel convinced that he might have indulged us with fifty 

 pleasantries for one that he now gives us, and that we might have had 

 to thank him for beguiling the cares of a month, instead of tantalizing 

 us with the amusement of a day. 



After seeing his first shots fired in Walcheren, the young Rifleman 

 " retired upon Scotland," to get rid of the ague, which was all that 

 we got by our conquest. 



In 1810, he heard that his company in the 95th was at Spithead 

 under orders for the Peninsula, rushed from his heathy hills to take 

 a share in the Spanish glories, and landed in Lisbon. 



There he made the discovery which every stranger has made for the 

 last five hundred years, that Lisbon is a very showy city from the river, 

 and that it would require the whole river poured through its streets to 

 make it endurable by the senses of any living thing but a pig or a 

 Portuguese. 



* " Adventures in the Rifle Brigade, in the Peninsula, France, and the Netherlands, 

 from 1809 to 1815." By CAPTAIN J. KINCAID. London. Booiic. 



