SHAKSPEARE.

At daybreak, the bustle of the camp awoke me. I rose hastily, mounted
my horse, and spurred to the rendezvous of the general staff. Nothing
could be more animated than the scene before me, and which spread to
the utmost reach of view. The advance of the combined forces had moved
at early dawn, and the columns were seen far away, ascending the sides
of a hilly range by different routes, sometimes penetrating through
the forest, and catching the lights of a brilliant rising sun on their
plumes and arms. The sound of their trumpets and bands was heard from
time to time, enriched by the distance, and coming on the fresh
morning breeze, with something of its freshness, to the ear and the
mind. The troops now passing under the knoll on which the
commander-in-chief and his staff had taken their stand, were the main
body, and were Austrian, fine-looking battalions, superbly uniformed,
and covered with military decorations, the fruits of the late Turkish
campaigns, and the picked troops of an empire of thirty millions of
men. Nothing could be more brilliant, novel, or picturesque, than the
display of this admirable force, as it moved in front of the rising
ground on which our _cortege_ stood.

"You will now see," said Varnhorst, who sat curbing, with no slight
difficulty, his fiery Ukraine charger at my side, "the troops of
countries of which Europe, in general, knows no more than of the
tribes of the new world. The Austrian sceptre brings into the field
all the barbaric arms and costumes of the border land of Christendom
and the Turk."

Varnhorst, familiar with every service of the continent, was a capital
cicerone, and I listened with strong interest as he pronounced the
names, and gave little characteristic anecdotes, of the gallant
regiments that successively wheeled at the foot of the slope--the
Archducal grenadiers--the Eugene battalion, which had won their
horse-tails at the passage of the Danube--the Lichtensteins, who had
stormed Belgrade--the Imperial Guard, a magnificent corps, who had led
the last assault on the Grand Vizier's lines, and finished the war.
The light infantry of Maria Theresa, and the Hungarian grenadiers and
cuirassiers, a mass of steel and gold, closed the march of the main
body. Nothing could be more splendid. And all this was done under the
perpetual peal of trumpets, and the thunder of drums and gongs, that
seemed absolutely to shake the air. It was completely the Milton