e engine of his ambitious
schemes. Schiller's early experience of a military life seems now to
have stood him in good stead; his soldiers are delineated with the
distinctness of actual observation; in rugged sharpness of feature,
they sometimes remind us of Smollett's seamen. Here are all the wild
lawless spirits of Europe assembled within the circuit of a single
trench. Violent, tempestuous, unstable is the life they lead.
Ishmaelites, their hands against every man, and every man's hand
against them; the instruments of rapine; tarnished with almost every
vice, and knowing scarcely any virtue but those of reckless bravery
and uncalculating obedience to their leader, their situation still
presents some aspects which affect or amuse us; and these the poet has
seized with his accustomed skill. Much of the cruelty and repulsive
harshness of these soldiers, we are taught to forget in contemplating
their forlorn houseless wanderings, and the practical magnanimity,
with which even they contrive to wring from Fortune a tolerable
scantling of enjoyment. Their manner of existence Wallenstein has, at
an after period of the action, rather movingly expressed:

'Our life was but a battle and a march,
And, like the wind's blast, never-resting, homeless,
We storm'd across the war-convulsed Earth.'

Still farther to soften the asperities of the scene, the dialogue is
cast into a rude Hudibrastic metre, full of forced rhymes, and strange
double-endings, with a rhythm ever changing, ever rough and lively,
which might almost be compared to the hard, irregular, fluctuating
sound of the regimental drum. In this ludicrous doggrel, with phrases
and figures of a correspondent cast, homely, ridiculous, graphic,
these men of service paint their hopes and doings. There are ranks and
kinds among them; representatives of all the constituent parts of the
motley multitude, which followed this prince of _Condottieri_. The
solemn pedantry of the ancient Wachtmeister is faithfully given; no
less so are the jocund ferocity and heedless daring of Holky's
Jaegers, or the iron courage and stern camp-philosophy of Pappenheim's
Cuirassiers. Of the Jaeger the sole principle is military obedience; he
does not reflect or calculate; his business is to do whatever he is
ordered, and to enjoy whatever he can reach. 'Free wished I to live,'
he says,

'Free wished I to live, and easy and gay,
And see something new on each new day;
In t