1830.] The Captain of Rifles. 447 



In this gay strain, he runs through the peninsular campaigns, fighting 

 and falling in love alternately. The sieges of the great fortresses, the 

 famous march to the frontier of France, and the battles of Vittoria, the 

 Pyrenees, and Thoulouse, are spiritedly described. The peace at length 

 sets him loose in 1814 ; and he is shooting at woodcocks in Scotland, 

 when news arrives of Napoleon's return. He rejoins his battalion, 

 fights at Waterloo, which he describes capitally, and thus triumphantly 

 closes one of the most attractive, eccentric and animated volumes that 

 has been produced by the British campaigns. 



NOTES OF THE MONTH ON AFFAIRS IN GENERAL. 



OUR grand Reforms are going on in a grand style of excision. Clerks, 

 enjoying the extravagant salaries of twenty shillings a week, are forced 

 to submit to the pruning knife, or the sabre, we forget which ; and serve 

 their insulted country at the rate of ten. Diggers and delvers, at the 

 rate of a shilling a day, are allowed the honour of contributing to the 

 preservation of their country by the offering of six-pences, and there is 

 still a hope, that by further judicious reforms of this vigorous, and yet 

 easy kind, our beloved country may yet be saved. 



But we should wish to know, whether the gallant officers in possession 

 of trivial places from fifteen hundred to five thousand pounds a year 

 and upwards, continue to receive their half-pay, and all those little emo- 

 lumentary adjuncts, termed allowances, forage money, office money, &c., 

 which make so pleasant an addition to the establishment of a military 

 gentleman emulous of serving his country, on the best possible terms for 

 himself. We believe that those gallant gentleman have not sacrificed 

 a single shilling, and that they receive their half-pay as regularly in 

 their sumptuously furnished apartments in the Horse Guards and 

 Downing Street, as if they were lounging out their mornings in an attic 

 in Whitehall, and lounging out their evenings at the United Service. 



We should also like to know, how many of the holders of good things 

 in the shape of Military Inspectorships, Commissioners of Clothing, &c., 

 have been mulcted of their half-pay, since they began to feel the 

 public purse dropping its liberality on them in the shower of pensions 

 and sinecures ? 



Now for another branch. 



Officers' Widows. The question whether officers' widows should 

 continue to enjoy pensions after marrying again, is now under the con- 

 sideration of Government. It is urged that the practice is, in fact, 

 rewarding one man for the services performed by another, and encou- 

 raging improvident connections which lead to misery, while they per- 

 petuate one burthen on the country and create another. 



All this may be very well ; though in the scantiness of the widow's 

 pension, whose general sum is thirty or forty pounds a year, there 

 seems to be no very powerful temptation for fortune hunters. But, we 

 may be suffered to ask, is there any idea of reducing the allowance of 

 the paymasters of those widows' pensions ? whose salaries amount to a 

 thousand a year each ; the whole actual business being of the simplest 

 nature, and done by clerks, and the whole trouble of the paymasters 

 being to sign the receipt for their own quarter's salary, and put the 

 money in their pockets. 



