, foot, and artillery,
while we read those gallant gentlemen a lecture on their costume; and we
will even add into the bargain that other most honourable and equally
useful branch of the public force "the mariners of England;"--as for
"the force," the police, truly we eschew them and their deeds. They are
a perverse, stiff-necked race, who wear two abominations, round hats and
short coats, and they have a villanous propensity of following you home
from your club of an evening, and inveigling you every now and then to
Bow Street, thrusting a broken knocker or two into your pocket as you go
along, and then pestering your bewildered memory with all sorts of
nocturnal misdemeanors; truly they are a race of noxious vermin; pretty
well, perhaps, for the protection of the swinish multitude; but for us
gentlemen, why, they "come betwixt the wind and our nobility," and their
remembrance stinks in our nostrils! One thing only we know in their
favour,--they dress all in one colour; their blueness alone makes them
sufferable in this nineteenth century of ours, and whenever they depart
from this great principle of aesthetic unity, we will bring in a bill for
their suppression.

Now, if there be any thing more self-evident than the ante-Noachian
problem that "two and two make four," it is this axiom, the verity of
which was demonstrated long before Achilles behaved in so
ungentlemanlike a manner to Hector, when he took him that dirty drive
round Troy, viz., that utility for purposes of service is the very
essence and spirit of military costume. The finest dressed army in the
world had better be in plain clothes, if the excellence of their
clothing depends only upon its ornament; while, on the contrary, the
plainest and most rudely equipped corps will come out of campaign with
excellent military effect and appearance, provided only that their
clothing has been suited to their service. "My dear fellow," said an old
moustache to us one day on the Place du Carrousel, "give me 20,000 men
who have served in nothing but blouses and blue caps, and I'll make you
ten times as fine a line as all that mob of national guards there in
their new uniforms." And he was right; in military matters it is the man
that produces the real effect, as to appearance, upon the long run; and
the practised eye of the old campaigner would prefer a Waterloo man in a
smock-frock to any flunkey you could pick out, even though he were
dressed up as fine as Lady L----'