We will not enter into the account of Abbot Samson; it is a little historical sketch, perfect in its kind, in which no part is redundant, and which, being gathered itself from very scanty sources, will not bear further mutilation. We turn, therefore, from the _Past_, although, in a literary point of view, a very attractive portion of the work, and will draw our extracts (they cannot now be numerous) from his lucubrations upon the _Present_. Perhaps the most characteristic passage in the volume is that where, in the manner of a philosopher who suddenly finds himself awake in this "half-realized" world, he scans the institution of an _army_--looks out upon the _soldier_. "Who can despair of Government that passes a soldier's guard-house, or meets a red-coated man on the streets! That a body of men could be got together to kill other men when you bade them; this, _à priori_, does it not seem one of the impossiblest things? Yet look--behold it; in the stolidest of do-nothing Governments, that impossibility is a thing done. See it there, with buff-belts, red coats on its back; walking sentry at guard-houses, brushing white breeches in barracks; an indisputable, palpable fact. Out of grey antiquity, amid all finance-difficulties, _scaccarium_-tallies, ship-monies, coat-and-conduct monies, and vicissitudes of chance and time, there, down to the present blessed hour, it is. "Often, in these painfully decadent, and painfully nascent times, with their distresses, inarticulate gaspings, and 'impossibilities;' meeting a tall lifeguardsman in his snow-white trousers, or seeing those two statuesque lifeguardsmen, in their frowning bearskins, pipe-clayed buckskins, on their coal-black, sleek, fiery quadrupeds, riding sentry at the Horse-Guards--it strikes one with a kind of mournful interest, how, in such universal down-rushing and wrecked impotence of almost all old institutions, this oldest fighting institution is still so young! Fresh complexioned, firm-limbed, six feet by the standard, this fighting man has verily been got up, and can fight. While so much has not yet got into being, while so much has gone gradually out of it, and become an empty semblance, a clothes'-suit, and highest king's-cloaks, mere chimeras parading under them so long, are getting unsightly to the earnest eye, unsightly, almost offensive, like a costlier kind of scarecrow's blanket--here still is a reality!