host. These huge and dense squadrons, which succeeded in absurd contrast to the formation en haye, were gradually reduced, both in numbers and in depth of file, by Alva and Parma, as well as by Henry IV. and Prince Maurice; and towards the close of the century, they were usually formed not more than six deep.

With respect to the infantry, they were still arranged in masses at least ten deep, though the number of men in each, according to the strength of regiments, was undergoing a considerable diminution. In each regular mass of foot, the pikes, who yet composed the greatest proportion, formed the central or firm body; and the musketeers, who had succeeded the arquebusiers, were posted on the wings of the pikes, and still considered rather as skirmishers than as solid infantry. But any thing like system in the management of arms, either pike or musket, was yet almost unknown; and Montgomeri, one of our contemporary military writers, asserts that Prince Maurice of Nassau had alone, in his time, instituted a regular exercise for the infantry." "The proofs that Maurice at least did introduce such an exercise, have survived in a work, published in 1618, by one Adam Von Breen, and entitled, Le Maniement d'Armes de Nassau, avecq rondelles piques, espées et targes, representez par figures selon le nouveau ordre du tres illustre prince, Maurice de Nassau,' &c. His name suggests to me that the examples which you have chosen to illustrate the discipline and tactics of the age before us, have hitherto been taken almost exclusively from the Spanish practice. Is not this but a one-sided view of the subject?"

"Scarcely for the Spanish discipline was regarded and imitated until nearly the close of the sixteenth century, almost as the universal model of warlike excellence. I meant not, however, to have strained this fact into so absolute a consequence, as to omit a due reference in this place to the rise of that famous school of soldiership of which Maurice of Nassau was the most illustrious master, if not also the original founder. Its pupils formed altogether a different series of commanders from those trained in the Spanish ranks; and this distinct formation of two hostile schools of warfare throughout Europe, may be ascribed to the political features of the times. The identity of the religious quarrel which produced the French and Low Country wars, gave a common character and bond of union to the armies of the same party in both countries. The Protestants, especially of France, Germany, and the Netherlands, mingled for the support of their cause in the same ranks; several of the princes of the house of Nassau served long, and fought with various fortune, under the banners of Coligny; and that great leader of the Huguenots has sometimes been considered as the father of the school of Protestant generals. Whatever lessons, indeed, Maurice may with great probability be supposed to have received through his father and uncles from the practice of the French civil wars, the bent of his genius, and still more, the peculiarities of the theatre, and the contest on which he was engaged, gave a character of originality to his operations which marked him for the creator, not the follower, of a system. But our Henri Quatre was confessedly the pupil of Coligny, as in the next generation was the accomplished Rohan, of the royal soldier himself; and the King and the Duke may, from sprang in fact, be quoted as the two most renowned captains who

the Protestant school in France. In the Low Countries, I need not remind you that under the Princes of Nassau, its achievements were adorned with the names of the Norrises, the Sidneys, and the Veres of your own land; and that our Rohan and Turenne were the later pupils of the same system. On the other hand, the Spanish school, besides the great leaders, Alva, Parma, and Spinola, whom it produced on the original theatre of the Low Countries, was continued through the next age in the service of both branches of the House of Austria, and gave birth to the Tillys, the Waldsteins, and the Piccolominis. Nor were the cumbrous tactics of their predecessors discarded either by the Imperial or Spanish armies, until they had entailed the loss of the fatal fields of Lutzen and Rocroi."

"How then, if you maintain that Parma's discipline and tactics formed the model of all soldiership in the period immediately before us, do you at the same time distinguish the characteristics of the rival services, which you have opposed to each other under the term of the Spanish and Protestant schools?"

"The real distinction between them was the later growth of the epoch before us; and its true author I conceive to have been Maurice of Nassau: whom, for this reason, I formerly designated as the first restorer among the moderns of the true science of antiquity. The extent of the reforms which he introduced in the armament, training, formation, and movement of troops, must be judged rather in the results which his contemporaries have recorded as the fruits of his skill, than by any dry enumeration of details. We gather from his own declarations, and the testimony which the congenial spirit of Rohan has rendered to his memory, that he had deeply studied the enduring principles of ancient art, and laboured to modernize their application. You have seen that he taught a cavalry of inferior physical weight to engage at close encounter, and to overthrow the ponderous masses of gens-d'armerie; that he first accustomed the infantry to a systematic management of their arms; and that we owe the uniformity of exercise and movement, which have become the simplest elements of martial instruction, to his institutions. To all this may be added that the celerity, as well as good order, of his marches, the excellent arrangement by which he husbanded the lives and health of his troops, and the skill with which his encampments were chosen and secured from assault, are the constant subject of contemporary eulogy. Vere, in his relation of the battle of Nieuport, ascribes a superiority to Prince Maurice's army, from 'that skill and dexterity we presumed to excel our enemies in, which was the apt and agile motions of our battalions.' During the operations which preceded that action, Maurice's army had still been formed and moved according to the prevalent custom, in vanguard, battle, and rereward: but two years later, in the campaign of 1602, which the Prince opened with the siege and capture of Grave, in presence of a Spanish army of rather superior numbers, we find the first essay of a better system of tactics. For Maurice dividing his forces, which consisted of five thousand cavalry and eighteen thousand foot, into three bodies, but rejecting their old denomination, conducted his marches and other operations, not in consecutive but simultaneous order. The right wing, composed of the English foot, was commanded by Sir Francis Vere, the centre corps by the Counts William and

THE BEACON LIGHT.

Henry, and the left by Count Ernest of Nassau. The cavalry were similarly formed in three bodies, and attached to the infantry; and the same distribution was made of the commissariat and baggage. And it is expressly stated in the narrative of Maurice's campaigns, which is appended to the Commentaries of Vere, that the three grand divisions of the army' marched in the foresaid order, not one behind another, but close together, being sometimes separated half an hour's journey from one another, and sometimes less.' In other words, the army moved in three columns, on as many contiguous lines of march; and this order is perhaps the most striking proof that can be offered of the revolution which Maurice had introduced in the tactical system of the' age. By such a disposition, combined with the superior agility'-to borrow the phrase of Vere-which his training had imparted to the infantry, Maurice acquired a constant advantage over his adversaries; and without reaching the freedom of tactical action which Gustavus. attained by the farther subdivision of great masses of foot, he, first of the moderns, invested the operations of warfare with a boldness and activity, which were totally unknown to the slow regularity of the Spanish school."

H. R.

THE BEACON-LIGHT.

BY MISS PARDOE.

Darkness was deep'ning o'er the seas,
And still the hulk drove on;

No sail to answer to the breeze,
Her masts and cordage gone:
Gloomy and drear her course of fear,
Each look'd but for a grave,
When full in sight, the Beacon-light
Came streaming o'er the wave!

Then wildly rose the gladd'ning shout
Of all that hardy crew-
Boldly they put the helm about,

And through the surf they flew;
Storm was forgot, toil heeded not,
And loud the cheer they gave,
As full in sight, the Beacon-light
Came streaming o'er the wave!

And gaily oft the tale they told,
When they were safe on shore,

How hearts had sunk, and hope grown cold,
Amid the billows' roar;

That not a star had shone afar,

By its pale beam to save,

When full in sight, the Beacon-light,

Came streaming o'er the wave!

SERVICE AFLOAT DURING THE LATE WAR.*

BEING THE PERSONAL NARRATIVE OF A NAVAL OFFICER.

WE now approach a subject of much interest as connected with the natural history of these islands. To this we are led by events which occurred in this quarter in 1812, and which were well calculated to illustrate the physical changes which these and other parts of the globe have undergone, and may still be expected to undergo, by the workings of Nature, in her grand laboratory, through the medium of earthquakes, volcanoes, and their immediate cause, subterranean combustion. As the principal theatre of some very singular phenomena, under the head of the latter, (of which I was an eye-witness,) was the little Island of St. Vincent, I shall say a few words of that island. St. Vincent's lies about twenty miles south of St. Lucia, in latitude 13° 5' North, and longitude 61° West. The whole is a pile of lofty mountains, in many parts thickly wooded, and with a profuse vegetation. The intervening valleys are well watered, and extremely fertile, the soil being a fine mould, well adapted for sugar. The principal, and indeed only town, though three or four villages are distinguished by the appellation, is Kingston, in the south-west quarter of the island, itself scarcely deserving the name. Kingston is situated on a narrow slip of land, at the foot of a grand amphitheatre of mountains. This island is remarkable as the last of the range in which that devoted race, the aboriginals of the islands (called the Yellow Charaibs), finally took refuge. This remnant of the former lords of the soil, have, since the arrival of Europeans, rapidly decreased, until but a few, if any remain ; they have, however, been replaced by a race called the Black Charaibs, who are inconsiderable in number, (amounting to not more than a few thousand,) and who divide the island at this day with their European invaders. These savages are descended from a body of negroes, who constituted the cargo of a ship from the coast of Guinea, which, in the latter end of the seventeenth century, was wrecked or run on shore on the island: these, augmented from time to time by runaways from Barbadoes, and intermarrying with the aborigines, have adopted their customs, even to the flattening of the foreheads of their infants; and thus the two races have been confounded together.

I have before alluded to the traces everywhere evident of volcanic action throughout these islands. The greater part, if not the whole of the direct chain, have volcanoes either exhausted or in action. Of the latter still burning, are those of St. Lucia, St. Vincent, and Guadaloupe; and if the emission of vapour and sulphurous gases from various fissures and openings, are any evidence to the same effect, Dominica may also be reckoned among them. Of the former, the greater portion of the remaining larger ones have well defined craters, which show that they were in activity at no very remote period. That of the Solfatara of Mount Missery, a lofty and remarkable craggy peak in the island of St. Christopher, was burning in 1692. To these facts, others more recent and equally interesting, which I am about to subjoin, may, perhaps, tend to throw some light on the causes of the great workings of nature.

Among these, the comparatively recent catastrophe at Caraccas, and • Continued from page 71.

the tremendous eruption of the great Souffrier of St. Vincent's in April 1812, with the remarkable phenomena that attended them, are the most prominent. Of some of them I was an eye-witness; of others I had ample and immediate means of getting information on the spot. Among other deductions from these, are some interesting proofs, which go far in demonstrating the connection between the causes of earthquakes and volcanoes, that the whole of the Antilles are but collateral branches of the continental ridges of the New World, broken and separated by earthquakes, volcanoes, and currents; that the great basin of the Caribbean Sea, also formed part of the neighbouring continent; and, lastly, that a submarine communication still subsists between all these islands, connected with a vast Souterran, extending to the mountains of Caraccas, and probably through the whole chain of the Andes, in one direction, and also in another direction, namely, from the eastern extremity of the Atlantic to the centre of North America; at least, if the volcanic birth of Sabrina Island, off St. Michael's, in 1811,† (which literally took place in the presence of the crew of one of our sloops-of-war of that name,) and the repeated shocks of earthquakes experienced on the mountains of the Ohio, are to be considered as linked with them in their respective causes. It will be remarked that the earthquake in Venezuela preceded the eruption of St. Vincent's some thirty-five days. A similar coincidence attended the last eruption of the Souffrier at Guadaloupe, which, however, preceded an earthquake that shook the northern shores of South America, and destroyed the city of Cumana; the former occurring on the 4th of Nov. the latter on the 10th Dec. 1797. These shocks were for the most part felt throughout the islands, in a direction from east to west, with an undulating motion, and sometimes accompanied by a noise under ground, like the rumbling of distant thunder; but the effects of this mighty commotion exhausted itself, as in 1812, on the devoted continent, without injuring the chain of islands.

The volcanoes called the Souffruri, had slept so long, that only vague and traditionary accounts of any eruption existed, the last haing occurred in 1718. The whole island, as seen from the sea, appears one huge mass of lofty rugged mountains, rising, on most sides, abruptly from the sea; of these the Souffrier is the most majestic of all those bearing volcanic vestiges. Its altitude is 3000 feet above the level of the ocean. The crater, which, previous to the eruption, was about twothirds up the side of the mountain, exceeded half a mile in diameter, and was about 500 feet deep. In the centre of this rose a conical hill, 200 feet in diameter, and 300 in height, the lower half fringed with brushwood, the upper strewed with virgin sulphur. From the fissures of this exuded a thin white smoke, occasionally tinged with a light bluish flame. At the base of this cone were two small lakes, differing essentially in quality and temperature from each other. Evergreens, flowers, aromatic shrubs, and a variety of indigenous plants, clothed the

* In this great earthquake, which occurred on the 26th of March 1812 (Holy Thursday), at a moment when the churches were crowded, 20,000 persons perished in the city and district of Caraccas alone.

This phenomenon occurred on the 30th January 1811. An island of sand was seen to emerge from the ocean, which, in a few weeks, acquired an elevation of upwards of 300 feet. This was taken possession of in form by the Captain of the Sabrina, in the name of His Britannic Majesty.