When we picture to ourselves these bravo "heavies"--so formidable if opposed to French or German dragoons--inefficiently floundering, on overweighted horses, through bush and brushwood, after the agile barbarians of South Africa, and when we contrast them with the really "_light_-horse" we have seen shipped from Provençal ports for service in Algeria, we cannot but admit, however unwillingly, that these things are better managed in France than on our side of the Channel. May it soon be otherwise! MY NOVEL; OR, VARIETIES IN ENGLISH LIFE. BY PISISTRATUS CAXTON. BOOK X--INITIAL CHAPTER. It is observed by a very pleasant writer--read now-a-days only by the brave pertinacious few who still struggle hard to rescue from the House of Pluto the souls of departed authors, jostled and chaced as those souls are by the noisy footsteps of the living--it is observed by the admirable Charron, that "judgment and wisdom is not only the best, but the happiest portion God Almighty hath distributed amongst men; for though this distribution be made with a very uneven hand, yet nobody thinks himself stinted or ill-dealt with, but he that hath never so little is contented in _this_ respect."[5] [5] Translation of _Charron on Wisdom_. By G. STANHOPE, D.D., late Dean of Canterbury, (1729.) A translation remarkable for ease, vigour, and (despite that contempt for the strict rules of grammar, which was common enough amongst writers at the commencement of the last century) for the idiomatic raciness of its English.