of the occupation of Algeria, was an average of one hundred and forty men per annum. In the four following years, eight hundred and eighty-five men perished. The capture of Constantine cost one hundred men, the much-vaunted affair of the Smala _nine_, the battle of Isly TWENTY-SEVEN! We well remember, for we chanced to be in Paris at the time, the stir produced in that excitable capital by the battle of Isly. No one, unacquainted with the facts, would have doubted that the victory was over a most valiant and formidable foe. People's mouths were filled with this revival of the military glories of Gaul. Newspapers and picture-shops, poets and painters, combined to celebrate the exploit and sound the victors' praise. One engraving _de circonstance_, we remember, represented a sturdy French foot-soldier, trampling, like Gulliver, a host of Lilliputian Moors, and carrying a score of them over his shoulder, spitted on his bayonet. "Out of my way!" was the inscription beneath the print--"_Les Français seront toujours les Français._" Horace Vernet, colourist, by special appointment, to the African campaign, pictorial chronicler of the heroic feats of the house militant of Orleans, prepared his best brushes, and stretched his broadest canvass, to immortalise the marshal and his men. After a few days, two dingy tents and an enormous umbrella were exhibited in the gardens of the Tuileries; these were trophies of the fight--the private property of Mohammed-Abderrhaman, the vanquished prince of Morocco, the real merit of whose conquerors was about as great as that of an active tiger who gloriously scatters a numerous flock of sheep. From one of several books relating to Algeria, now upon our table, we will take a French officer's account of the affair of Isly. The story of Escoffier, a trumpeter who generously resigned his horse to his dismounted captain, himself falling into the hands of the Arabs, whose prisoner he remained for about eighteen months, is told by M. Alby, an officer of the African army. Although a little vivid in the colouring, and comprising two or three very tough "yarns,"--due, we apprehend, to the imagination of trumpeter or author--its historical portion professes to be, and probably is, correct; and, at any rate, there can be no reason for suspecting the writer of depreciating his countrymen's achievements, and understating their merits. The account of the battle, or rather of the chase, for fighting there was none, is given by a deserter from the Spahis, who, after the defeat of the Moors, joined Abd-el-Kader. The Emir and his Arabs took no part in the affair.[10] [10] _A Campaign in the Kabylie._ By DAWSON BORRER, F.R.G.S., &c. London, 1848. _La Kabylie._ Par un Colon. Paris, 1846. _La Captivité du Trompette Escoffier._ Par ERNEST ALBY. 2 vols. Brussels, 1848.