168 Twelve Years’ Military Adventure. (Fes. 
pursuit of the French army, are vivid and forcible, but they lack that 
spirit of fun and good humour which is the very salt of his earlier 
relations. A story which he tells of the way in which a German soldier 
excused himself for stealing fowls, is odd enough :— 
« One day that I was quartered in a farm-house, along with some of our 
German dragoons, the owner came to complain to me that the soldiers had 
been killing his fowls, and pointed out one man in particular as the principal 
offender. The fact being brought home to the dragoon, he excused himself 
by saying, ‘ One shiken come frighten my horse, and I give him one kick, and 
he die.’ ‘ Oh, but,’ said I, ‘ the patron contends that you killed more than 
one fowl.’ ‘Oh yes; that shiken moder see me kick that shiken, so she come 
fly in my face, and IJ give her one kick, andshedie.’ Of course I reported the 
culprit to his officer, by whom he was punished as a notorious offender.” _— 
On the termination of the war, the author quitted the army, and now 
reposes under his laurels. One is very sorry to part with him, for a 
more agreeable good tempered companion, during twelve years, one is 
not likely to meet with; and although the book is the simplest and 
most unpretending possible, it is infitely more amusing, as well as 
intrinsically better, than some modern publications, the authors of which 
claim for themselves, with great complacency, the praise due to works 
of genius and imagination. 
‘THE THEATRES. 
Tar superb affair the Kive’s Turarre, having fallen into the hands of a 
Frenchman, the “ abstract and brief chroniclers of the time,” will have it 
that preparations for unrivalled success are made for the season. But we 
have seen the same thing said of the monarch of the Muscovites ; and we 
have become sceptical as to bulletins of all kinds, imperial and theatrical. 
Monsieur Laporte, like his royal prototype, is said to have a little insurrection 
at home. If Nicholas is in awe of the Poles, M. Laporte is at war with the 
fiddle-sticks. The orchestra is in astate of discord ; and those veteran leaders 
Lindley, Dragonetti, the head of the éite of clarionets, trumpets, and bassoons, 
declare that they will neither bow nor blow, for his Gallic majesty. Spagno- 
letti, is said to have left the camp, and, like a true Italian, come over to the 
paying side. But he was of no use to either side. The sterner spirit of the 
true born English fiddlers is still unsubdued, and M. Laporte must bring 
reinforcements from his native territory, or be forced to make, like Nicholas, 
a frost-bitten retreat of it, and comfort himself by swearing at the climate 
and the malevolence of fortune. 
In the meantime he is entrenching himself in the pit, where to the astonish- . 
ment and chagrin of all those sons of freedom and Fop’s Alley, who used 
to range over its mighty level, free as a Cossack over the plains of the 
Ukraine, a series of barricades have been constructed, impassable by all who 
have not the managerial pass of a regular annual subscription. Why this has 
been ever suffered, we are at a loss to understand. Things that are charming 
to the Parisian, have sometimes a different aspect to the English. The Parisian 
may like to be escorted every three steps by a gensdarme, to take his seat 
only by direction of a fixed bayonet, and to keep it with his eye perpetually 
fixed on the movements of a horse-guard blue. He may like to be told off — 
with his playgoing brethren into little sections and fragments of audiences, 
fixed in the basket-work of an open gallery, or the back benches ofa play- 
house paterre, with the satisfaction of seeing that the gentleman on the bench’ 
