“Sir Howard looked a soldier to the last, retaining his erect bearing, and walking with a firm step, though cautiously, and with looks bent on the ground. His sight had begun to fail, and cataracts were forming on both his eyes, but he did not submit them to medical treatment. ‘They will last my time,’ he remarked to the author. He contrived to write by never raising his pen, forming the letters by habit, and all were plain to one acquainted with his hand. A career of threescore years and ten left his character much what it first appeared, with all its elements of dash, vigour, enterprise, aptitude, and perception, its habits of industry, its generous instincts, and its warm sympathies. Neither heart nor mind showed the wear of life, and he is the same at eighty-five as at seventeen; inspiring the Volunteers at Hythe as he inspired them at Tynemouth, and exercising the inventive genius which scared the rats in improving the screw propeller. The hand that caught up the child in the shipwreck, obeyed the same impulse still; and Mr Bateman saw him walking up the street at Folkstone with a loaded basket which he had taken from a poor little girl. ‘My dear, give that to me,’ he said, as he saw her bending under the weight; ‘I am better able to carry it than you.’ The words were reported by a lady who heard them in passing, as the General of eighty-five and the poor child of five walked away together.” We are not going to draw an elaborate character of one whose life may be said to have formed his epitaph. Sir Howard Douglas needs no panegyrist to tell the world what he was. Chivalrous, truthful, high-minded, brave, he secured the esteem, not less than he commanded the respect, of all who approached him. Had circumstances so ordered it that he had ever directed the movement of troops in the field, we take it upon us to say, that among English generals few would have attained to higher eminence than he. As it was, he did more for the British army, and navy too, in his books and by his teaching, than either army or navy, or the heads of both branches of the service, have ever had the grace to acknowledge. To these more shining qualities of head and temperament he added the faith and humility of a Christian man: a humility which was far too real to be obtruded on careless observers; a faith which had not one shade of hypocrisy or fanaticism about it. Rest to his noble spirit! it will be long before we look upon his like again. ITALIAN BRIGANDAGE.