It is surprising that the African campaigns have not been more prolific of military sketches and memoirs from the pens of French officers. Although tolerably familiar for many years past with French literature, we can remember but few such works. _La Captivité d'Escoffier_, noticed, in conjunction with an English volume upon an analogous subject, in a former Number,[22] is the only French book of the kind we have met with for a long time; and that was of inferior class, and of less authentic appearance, than M. de Castellane's agreeable _Souvenirs_. We should have thought the war in Africa, the adventurous and often severe marches of the troops, the exploits of the hunting-field, the humours of garrison life, and the tales of the bivouac, would have found innumerable chroniclers amongst the better educated portion of French officers. The French soldier is a good study for painter or humourist; whether as the stolid recruit with the ploughman's slouch and the smell of the furrow still hanging about him, or the smart and wide-awake trooper of four or five years' service, or the weather-beaten old sergeant, all bronze and wrinkles, with his grizzled moustache, his scrap of red ribbon, his tough yarns and his mixture of simplicity and shrewdness, his lingering prejudices against English and Germans, and his religious veneration of Napoleon the Great. We believe M. de Castellane would be successful in portraiture of French military character and eccentricities, and we regret he has been so sparing of it. Here and there we find a characteristic bit of camp-life, or a pleasant sketch by the watch-fire.