of her Majesty’s vessels to get coal, which was furnished her from the royal stores, while French men-of-war were allowed no such indulgence; on departing she _was saluted by the fortress with twenty-one guns_! This I witnessed with my own eyes, and heard with my own ears. The assembled crowd said, ‘_Es loco_’—‘he is mad.’” Is Mr Urquhart certain to whom the crowd’s exclamation referred? His pet crotchet is by this time pretty generally recognised; and even his best friends, and a few partial admirers, cannot choose but smile at the tenacity of his monomania, and at the moonshine illumination he throws upon Russian designs and their British abettors. Truly he is a dead hand at a mare’s nest. With a scuttle of coals and a blank cartridge, he would build up a powder-plot, and talks darkly and ominously about “the system of government (in England) by secresy and intrigue.” We do think, however, he would have done more gracefully to let Sir Robert Wilson alone. “Since the above was written,” he says, “Sir Robert Wilson has disappeared from the scene. I do not on that account suppress what I have written, as I have not brought any charge against him.” No new charge; but he has revived and dragged forth an old one, wellnigh forgotten under the moss of years and the laurels of the departed veteran. It is no generous hand that will approach, otherwise than kindly and with reverence, the memory of the gallant soldier of the Peninsula, the brave defender of Portugal, the stout fighter by Dresden, of whom it has so truly been said, that “he ever was foremost where danger was to be encountered or glory won.”[8] Totally dissimilar in character as are the two works under examination, the transitions from the one to the other are yet astonishingly easy. Thus Mr Urquhart’s Muscovite nightmare leads us, in the most natural manner possible, to a tale of a cotton nightcap, related by his witty contemporary. At Tunis, M. Dumas was quite confounded by the prevalence of this unpoetical but comfortable head-dress, which he constantly met with in the streets and on the quays. Puzzled at its naturalisation in a clime so remote from its native country, (an honour which he claims for France,) and being of an inquisitive turn of mind, he instituted inquiries, and received for explanation an anecdote, which we shall here transcribe, as nearly as possible, in his own phraseology. We feel that we neglect Mr Urquhart, and ought by right to give precedence of extract to his muffin-investigation; but really the nightcap story is much more amusing, and quite as important, although it may possibly owe more to its narrator’s imagination.