This is a very heavy-handed picture of those exaggerated proportions
and that conquering gait which, as I say, render the tall Life
Guardsman one of the most familiar ornaments of the London
streets. But it is when he is armed and mounted that he is most
picturesque--when he sits, monumentally, astride of his black charger
in one of the big niches on either side of the gate of the Horse
Guards, cuirassed and helmeted, booted and spurred. I never fail to
admire him as I pass through the adjacent archway, as well as his
companions, equally helmeted and booted, who march up and down beside
him, and, as Taine says, alluding in his _Notes sur l'Angleterre_ to
the scene, "posent avec majeste devant les gamins." If I chance to be
in St. James's street when a semi-squadron of these elegant warriors
are returning from attendance upon royalty after a Drawing-Room or
a Levee, I am sure to make one of the gamins who stand upon the
curbstone to see them pass. If the day be a fine one at the height of
the season, and London happen to be wearing otherwise the brilliancy
of supreme fashion--with beautiful dandies at the club-windows, and
chariots ascending the sunny slope freighted with wigged and flowered
coachmen, great armorial hammercloths, powdered, appended footmen,
dowagers and debutantes--then the rattling, flashing, prancing
cavalcade of the long detachment of the Household troops strikes one
as the official expression of a thoroughly well-equipped society. It
must be added, however, that it is many a year since the Life Guards
or the Blues have had harder work than this. To escort their sovereign
to the railway-stations at London and Windsor has long been their most
arduous duty. They were present to very good purpose at Waterloo, but
since their return from that immortal field they have not been out of
England. Heavy cavalry, in modern warfare, has gone out of fashion,
and in case of a conflict in the East those nimble, pretty fellows the
Hussars, with their tight, dark-blue tunics so brilliantly embroidered
with yellow braid, would take precedence of their majestic comrades.
The Hussars are indeed the prettiest fellows of all, and if I were
fired with a martial ambition I should certainly enlist in their
ranks. I know of no military personage more agreeable to the civil eye
than a blue-and-yellow hussar, unless indeed it be a young officer in
the Rifle Brigade. The latter is perhaps, to a refined and chastened
taste, the