Among these is the present volume—the reminiscences of a subaltern of the Connaught Rangers, the old 88th. William Grattan was one of the well-known Dublin family of that name—a first-cousin of Thomas Colley Grattan the novelist, and a distant kinsman of Henry Grattan the statesman; he joined the regiment as ensign on July 6, 1809. He went out to the 1st Battalion, and reached it on the Caya late in 1809; he served with it till the spring of 1813, when he went home on leave, having obtained his lieutenancy on April 12, 1812. Thus he was for more than four years continuously with the colours, and saw Busaco, Fuentes d’Oñoro, El Bodon, the storms of Ciudad Rodrigo and Badajoz, Salamanca, and the disastrous retreat from Burgos. He was only off duty for a few weeks in 1812, in consequence of a wound received at Badajoz. In the ranks of the 3rd Division—the “Fighting Division” as he is proud to call it—he saw a greater portion of the war than most of his contemporaries, though he missed Vittoria and the invasion of France which followed. Grattan as an author had two great merits. He had a very considerable talent for describing battles--indeed some of his chapters would not have disgraced the pen of William Napier. Of the many memoirs which I have read, I think that his is on the whole the most graphic and picturesque in giving the details of actual conflict. His accounts of Fuentes D’Oñoro, Salamanca, and above all of the storm and sack of Ciudad Rodrigo and Badajoz, are admirable. The reader will find in them precisely the touches that make the picture live. His second virtue is a lively sense of humour. The Connaught Rangers were the most Irish of all Irish regiments, and the “boys that took the world _aisy_,” as Grattan calls them, were as strange a set to manage as ever tried an officer’s temper. “I cannot bring myself to think them, as many did, a parcel of devils,” writes Grattan; “neither will I by any manner of means try to pass them off for so many saints” (pp. 128–129); but whether good or bad, they were always amusing. For the exploits of Ody Brophy and Dan Carsons, of Darby Rooney and Barney Mackguekin, I must refer the reader to the book itself. Their doings, as recorded by the much-tried commander of their company, explain clearly enough Sir Thomas Picton’s addiction to drum-head court-martials, and Lord Wellington’s occasional bursts of plain and drastic language.[1] But no one with any sense of the ludicrous can profess any very lasting feeling of indignation against these merry if unscrupulous rascals. ----- Footnote 1: See, for example, his remarks on the 88th to Sir James M’Grigor, on page 259 of the latter’s autobiography. -----