e command of the Earl of Effingham. Our army
consisted of the thirty-fourth regiment of foot and six militia corps.
The consciousness of our defects was stimulated by friendly emulation.
We improved our time and opportunities in morning and evening
field-days; and in the general reviews the South Hampshire were rather
a credit than a disgrace to the line. In our subsequent quarters of the
Devizes and Blandford, we advanced with a quick step in our military
studies; the ballot of the ensuing summer renewed our vigour and youth;
and had the militia subsisted another year, we might have contested the
prize with the most perfect of our brethren.
The loss of so many busy and idle hours was not compensated by any
elegant pleasure; and my temper was insensibly soured by the society of
out rustic officers. In every state there exists, however, a balance of
good and evil. The habits of a sedentary life were usefully broken by
the duties of an active profession: in the healthful exercise of the
field I hunted with a battalion, instead of a pack; and at that time
I was ready, at any hour of the day or night, to fly from quarters to
London, from London to quarters, on the slightest call of private or
regimental business. But my principal obligation to the militia, was the
making me an Englishman, and a soldier. After my foreign education, with
my reserved temper, I should long have continued a stranger in my native
country, had I not been shaken in this various scene of new faces and
new friends: had not experience forced me to feel the characters of
our leading men, the state of parties, the forms of office, and the
operation of our civil and military system. In this peaceful service
I imbibed the rudiments of the language, and science of tactics, which
opened a new field of study and observation. I diligently read, and
meditated, the Memoires Militaires of Quintus Icilius, (Mr. Guichardt,)
the only writer who has united the merits of a professor and a veteran.
The discipline and evolutions of a modern battalion gave me a clearer
notion of the phalanx and the legion; and the captain of the Hampshire
grenadiers (the reader may smile) has not been useless to the historian
of the Roman empire.
A youth of any spirit is fired even by the play of arms, and in the
first sallies of my enthusiasm I had seriously attempted to embrace the
regular profession of a soldier. But this military fever was cooled by
the enjoyment of our mimic Bel
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