As in that island of dreams he recalled his stirring boyhood, his friendships formed and joyous under the shadow of death, his zeal and admiration for the great leaders under whom he served, his personal adventures and historic battles, his marches, bivouacs and careless jests, his pen became again like the pen of a boy who describes his house football match or the exploits of the favourite hero of the school. Like a boy too, he had his more important moments--his fine attempts at eloquence, grandiloquence; he became literary, self-conscious, innocently pompous, like a boy. The pen in his hand grew great as he proclaimed the valour of the brave, the pageant of plumed troops, the pomp of glorious war. And indeed the pen, grown mightier than the sword, executed at times cuts and flourishes so intricate that the modest editor has had to bring it to the scabbard, or, in his own language of the ink-pot, to contribute once or twice the necessary fullstop. But these tempestuous passages, these patches which aim at the purple, are few; and it should be said at once that they are never concerned with the author’s own exploits. It is the noble character of Sir John Moore that starts the rhapsody, or General Graham, or Paget, or Hill, or the great Wellington himself; and, above all, it is the indomitable valour of the British soldier--of the British soldier who is so often Irish. There may be some who think that Captain Blakeney should have apologised for being Irish; and indeed, though I protest against any shadow of apology, the Irish nature of our author, whose ancestors came out of Norfolk, may be mentioned as an explanation of the frank and flowing statement of his hopes and fears, his joys and sorrows, his moving accidents and hairbreadth escapes. Our Anglo-Saxon ideal of the young soldier becomes more and more the youth who is a hero and won’t mention it. He is a most engaging person too. Ask him of the deed which filled the daily papers and the mouths of men, and he blushes, mutters, and escapes to his club. If you bring all your power of persuasion to bear upon him in his most yielding hour, you may draw from him some such statement as this: “Well, I cut the Johnny down and I brought the Tommy off. It was all rot, and there was nothing in it; any chap would have done it.” That is fine. Perhaps it is the fine flower of a race more eminent in action than in art. But if we care for memoirs, let us be thankful for the Frenchman or the Irishman who will do his deeds of daring and not be ashamed to describe them for our profit and our pleasure. Nor is it fair to infer that there is more vanity in the one than in the other. In the case of Blakeney, at least, I shall be disappointed indeed if any reader suspect him of braggadocio. When he relates his own adventures, his own acts in battle, his language is simple, direct, vivid; he states plain facts. When he recalls the exploits of others--of veteran generals, of boys like himself, of