as volunteer; and, joining the army, engaged at the time in the
siege of St. Sebastian, under General Graham, he was promoted shortly
after, through the influence of his generous patron, to a lieutenancy in
the 42d Highlanders. He served in that distinguished regiment on to the
closing campaign of the Pyrenees; but received at the battle of Toulouse
a wound so severe as to render him ever after incapable of active bodily
exertion; and so he had to retire from the army on half-pay, and a
pension honorably earned. The history of his career as a soldier he has
told with singular interest, in one of the earlier volumes of
"Constable's Miscellany;" and his poems abound in snatches of
description painfully true, drawn from his experience of the military
life,--of scenes of stern misery and grim desolation, of injuries
received, and of sufferings inflicted,--that must have contrasted sadly
in his mind, in their character as gross realities, with the dreamy
visions of conquest and glory in which he had indulged at an earlier
time. The ruin of St. Sebastian, complete enough, and attended with
circumstances of the horrible extreme enough, to appal men long
acquainted with the trade of war, must have powerfully impressed an
imaginative susceptible lad, fresh from the domesticities of a rural
manse, in whose quiet neighborhood the voice of battle had not been
heard for centuries, and surrounded by a simple people, remarkable for
the respect which they bear to human life. In all probability, the power
evinced in his description of the siege, and of the utter desolation in
which it terminated, is in part owing to the fresh impressibility of his
mind at the time. Such, at least, was my feeling regarding it, as I
caught myself muttering some of its more graphic passages, and saw, from
the degree of alarm evinced by the boy who drove the mail-gig, that the
sounds were not quite lost in the rattle of that somewhat rickety
vehicle, and that he had come to entertain serious doubts respecting the
sanity of his passenger:--

"Sebastian, when I saw thee last,
It was in Desolation's day,
As through thy voiceless streets I passed,
Thy piles in heaps of rubbish lay;
The roofless fragments of each wall
Bore many a dent of shell and ball;
With blood were all thy gateways red,
And thou,--a city of the dead!

With fire and sword thy walks were swept:
Exploded mines thy streets had heaped
In hills of rubbish; they had been
Tr