Page:Once a Week Jul - Dec 1859.pdf/454

 Rh could hardly turn traitor. This was no fancy, no delusion of sore feeling. In Dorsetshire the Protestant magistracy searched every cellar and cupboard of a convent, to seize arms and ammunition suspected to be hidden there; and also something else—the person of “a brother of Bonaparte.” It must have been a remarkable scene, when the justices came up from the cellar, and were met by the Lady Superior with the rebuke they deserved. She reminded them that if she and the sisters were Catholics, they were also Englishwomen. Ah! the times are changed since then. We know nothing now of spies in public-houses; and the speeches of the Pope’s pitying adorers in Ireland lead to no reports of foreign princes or priests being hidden in convents. No man is questioned about his church when he wishes to enter a volunteer rifle-corps; and the one thing that every man is most sure of about all his neighbours is that they will each resist to the death the landing of an invader. The temper of the present day is as much in advance of the former one as the arts of life. For the man and horse in waiting, we have the railway. For the telegraph and its slow spelling with its clumsy arms, we have the electric wire and its lightning speech.

There was something fine, pathetic, and yet comic in the way of going to work to make soldiers, in town and country. In the towns there were companies of artisans, differing from each other as much as Falstaff’s recruits. Broad-chested carpenters and masons, with a rolling walk; dapper shopmen with a toe and heel step; wizened little weavers, with spindle shanks and bent shoulders, and bilious complexions, and bony fingers, shuffling along—these in procession in the middle of the street, with drum and fife, playing a march on going out to drill; and on returning, the universal strain, exulted in by all towns and counties of two syllables (or that could make three fit in),

Jove, the god of thunder, Mars, the god of war; Neptune with his trident, Apollo in his car:— All the gods celestial Descend from their spheres, To view with admiration The Harwich volunteers.

Or the Kentish volunteers, or the Bristol, or Lincoln, or any other. It was noble to see the eagerness of all kinds of men to learn the discipline, and the use of arms, for the defence of their homes. It was pathetic to see the horror of the press-gang when sailors were wanted; and to witness the heroism with which mothers and maidens sent forth their sons and their lovers, either into the militia, knowing it was for the line, or directly into the line. It was comic to see the audacity with which men who scarcely knew one end of the musket from the other, dared Boney to come and try what Britons were made of. It was both pathetic and comic to overhear children confiding to each other what they would do whenever Bonaparte came. There was a universal resolution to bar his entrance into every house; or to blow him up from the cellar, or knock him down from the stairs, if he got in; be he man or something worse; and few were quite sure what he was, in those days of many rumours, few newspapers, and scanty movement from place to place.

We should remember that the great reliance at that, as in all former days, was on the navy. There was no question of the superiority of our navy, while the Peninsular war had not shown what our soldiers could do. It was clumsy work, the exercising of the volunteers, with muskets which at best, and in actual warfare, made scores of misses to one hit. The Martello towers along the south coast, which were said to be sure to fall in as soon as their guns were fired, were early discredited in comparison with our wooden walls.

Britannia needs no bulwarks, No towers along the steep: Her march is o’er the ocean waves, Her home is on the deep.

This was the general feeling; and when the citizens armed and drilled, it was as an insurance against the consequences of some signal calamity to the fleet.

But we must not forget, amidst the vivid images of that time, what has happened since. The French never came: and when their defeat and exhaustion secured peace for some time to come, soldiering of all kinds fell into disrepute in England. Peace did not at once bring plenty; the returned soldiers were thrown back upon society, when there was not work and wages enough for the civilians; and they and their profession became unpopular. By the time that manufactures and trade began to expand, through an improvement in our policy, we had receded somewhat too far from the soldiering practices of the beginning of the century.

Let us not forget the gait and bearing of the middle-classes during the years of reaction from commercial distress, and before the re-awakening of that martial spirit which nestles in the heart of every true Briton. It is not many years since we saw children almost forgetting how to play, unless at public schools; and none dreaming of playing at soldiers. Our middle-aged men did not know the use of their limbs, unless they were university athletes, or country gentlemen. Of the young men, how few could row, or play cricket, or follow the hounds, or even ride or swim at all! They used to shuffle or strut along the street pavement, and creep up a coachbox, and climb painfully over a stile. They could hardly mount the stairs three at a time in case of a fire, or run up a ladder, or leap a ditch, or knock down a thief to save their lives. It was all want of practice. Nobody then thought any more of England being really invaded, than of a comet burning up the globe; and just at the same time there was a great spread of pedantry about intellectual recreations, and literary accomplishments. Thus, when the Prince de Joinville published his views about an invasion of England, we were just in the state to disrelish the idea to the very utmost.

It was a wretched sensation, it must be owned. There was no cowardice about it. Nobody for a moment doubted anybody’s love of country, and the courage which springs from that love: but