be correct,
find any peculiar favour in woman's eyes, although they wear very bright
red jackets, and have the additional advantage of constantly appearing in
public on horseback, which last circumstance may be naturally supposed to
be greatly in their favour.

We have sometimes thought that this phenomenon may take its rise in the
conventional behaviour of captains and colonels and other gentlemen in
red coats on the stage, where they are invariably represented as fine
swaggering fellows, talking of nothing but charming girls, their king and
country, their honour, and their debts, and crowing over the inferior
classes of the community, whom they occasionally treat with a little
gentlemanly swindling, no less to the improvement and pleasure of the
audience, than to the satisfaction and approval of the choice spirits who
consort with them. But we will not devote these pages to our
speculations upon the subject, inasmuch as our business at the present
moment is not so much with the young ladies who are bewitched by her
Majesty's livery as with the young gentlemen whose heads are turned by
it. For 'heads' we had written 'brains;' but upon consideration, we
think the former the more appropriate word of the two.

These young gentlemen may be divided into two classes--young gentlemen
who are actually in the army, and young gentlemen who, having an intense
and enthusiastic admiration for all things appertaining to a military
life, are compelled by adverse fortune or adverse relations to wear out
their existence in some ignoble counting-house. We will take this latter
description of military young gentlemen first.

The whole heart and soul of the military young gentleman are concentrated
in his favourite topic. There is nothing that he is so learned upon as
uniforms; he will tell you, without faltering for an instant, what the
habiliments of any one regiment are turned up with, what regiment wear
stripes down the outside and inside of the leg, and how many buttons the
Tenth had on their coats; he knows to a fraction how many yards and odd
inches of gold lace it takes to make an ensign in the Guards; is deeply
read in the comparative merits of different bands, and the apparelling of
trumpeters; and is very luminous indeed in descanting upon 'crack
regiments,' and the 'crack' gentlemen who compose them, of whose
mightiness and grandeur he is never tired of telling.

We were suggesting to a military young gentleman only th