as they are, were but slightly felt in our encampment round the frowning ramparts of the city. We had already swept all before us; we had learned the language of victory; we were in the midst of a country abounding with all the good things of life, and which, though far from exhibiting the luxuriant beauty of the British plains, was yet rich and various enough to please the eye. Our camp was one vast scene of gaiety. War had, if ever, laid aside its darker draperies, and "grim-visaged" as it is, had smoothed its "wrinkled front." The presence of so many visitors of the highest rank gave every thing the air of royalty. High manners, splendid entertainments, and all the habits and indulgences of the life of courts, had fled from France only to be revived in Flanders. Our army was a court on the march; and the commander of the British--the honest, kind-hearted, and brave Duke of York--bore his rank like a prince, and gathered involuntarily round him as showy a circle as ever figured in St James's, or even in the glittering saloons of the Tuileries. Hunting parties, balls, suppers, and amateur theatrical performances, not merely varied the time, but made it fly. Hope had its share too, as well as possession. Paris was before us; and on the road to the capital lay but the one fortress which was about to be destroyed with our fire, and of which our engineers talked with contempt as the decayed work of "old" Vauban. But the course of victory is like the course of love, which, the poet says, "never does run smooth." The successes of the Allies had been too rapid for their cabinets; and we had found ourselves on the frontiers of France before the guardian genii of Europe, in the shape of the stiff-skirted and full-wigged privy councillors of Vienna and Berlin, had made up their minds as to our disposal of the prize. Startling words suddenly began to make their appearance in the despatches, and "indemnity for the past and security for the future"--those luckless phrases which were yet destined to form so large a portion of senatorial eloquence, and give birth to so prolific an offspring of European ridicule--figured in diplomacy for the first time; while our pioneers stood, pickaxe in hand, waiting the order to break ground. We thus lost day after day. Couriers were busy, while soldiers were yawning themselves to death; and the only war carried on was in the discontents of the military councils. Who was to have Valenciennes? whose flag was to be hoisted on Lille? what army was to garrison Conde? became national questions. Who was to cut the favourite slices of France, employed all the gossips of the camp, in imitation of the graver gossips of the cabinet; and, in the mean time, we were saved the trouble of the division, by a furious decree from the Convention ordering every man in France to take up arms--converting all the churches into arsenals, anathematizing the German princes as so many brute beasts, and