Lastly, the baron being no more able to maintain his authority by force, seeks to keep it by form; he reduces his own subordinates to a fine machinery, and obtains the command of it by purchase or intrigue. The necessity of distinction of character is in war so absolute, and the tests of it are so many, that, in spite of every abuse, good officers get sometimes the command of squadrons or of ships; and one good officer in a hundred is enough to save the honour of an army, and the credit of a system: but generally speaking, our officers at this day do not know their business; and the result is--that, paying thirty millions a year for our army, we are informed by Mr. Grant Duff that the army we have bought is of no use, and we must pay still more money to produce any effect upon foreign affairs. So, you see, this is the actual state of things,--and it is the perfection of liberalism,--that first we cannot buy a Raphael for five-and-twenty pounds, because we have to pay five hundred for a pocket pistol; and next, we are coolly told that the pocket pistol won't go off, and that we must still pay foreign constables to keep the peace. In old times, under the pure baronial power, things used, as I told you, to be differently managed by us. We were, all of us, in some sense barons; and paid ourselves for fighting. We had no pocket pistols, nor Woolwich Infants--nothing but bows and spears, good horses, (I hear, after two-thirds of our existing barons have ruined their youth in horseracing, and a good many of them their fortunes also, we are now in irremediable want of horses for our cavalry,) and bright armour. Its brightness, observe, was an essential matter with us. Last autumn I saw, even in modern England, something bright; low sunshine at six o'clock of an October morning, glancing down a long bank of fern covered with hoar-frost, in Yewdale, at the head of Coniston Water. I noted it as more beautiful than anything I had ever seen, to my remembrance, in gladness and infinitude of light. Now, Scott uses this very image to describe the look of the chain-mail of a soldier in one of these free [10] companies;--Le Balafré, Quentin Durward's uncle:--"The archer's gorget, arm-pieces, and gauntlets were of the finest steel, curiously inlaid with silver, and his hauberk, or shirt of mail, was as clear and bright as the frost-work of a winter morning upon fern or briar." And Sir John Hawkwood's men, of whose proceedings in Italy I have now to give you some account, were named throughout Italy, as I told you in my first letter, the White Company of English,--'Societas alba Anglicorum,' or generally, the Great White Company, merely from the splendour of their arms. They crossed the Alps in 1361, and immediately caused a curious change in the Italian language. Azario lays great stress on their tall spears with a very long iron point at the extremity; this formidable weapon being for the most part wielded by two, and sometimes moreover by