As each verse finished with, “When he hears the last bugle,” Willis sounded the bugle in a manner which seemed almost a foretaste of the muse of another world. “When he hears the last bugle”—is again repeated, and the bugle accompaniment is lower and still sweeter. But at the concluding words, “When he hears the last bugle he’ll stand to his arms”—the loud, exulting and melodious tones of the noble instrument came out in all their fullness of sound, with an effect that elicited the most rapturous applause, and which words cannot describe nor imagination conceive. How much is the beauty of music assisted by the beauty of poetry. Shame on selfish composers and conceited performers who, “wishing all the interest to centre in themselves,” assert that the words of a song are of no consequence, and that if good, they only divert the attention of the hearers from the music—Milton thought otherwise when (himself a fine musician) he speaks of the double charms of “music married to immortal verse.” As well might we say that it was a disadvantage for a handsome woman to possess a fine figure, lest it should render the beauty of her face less conspicuous. Music affords additional delight when, it accompanies the recollection of some interesting fact; or of some fanciful and vivid allusion connected with romance, that idol of the young and enthusiastic. Among the numerous accounts of the peninsular war which have been given to the world by English officers, I was much struck by a little incident that I once read in a description of the entrance of Wellington’s army into France while expelling the French from Spain and following them into their own land beyond the Pyrenees. The first division of the English troops had at length reached the frontier. After a day of toilsome march the regiment to which our author belonged encamped for the night in the far-famed valley of Roncevalles, where a thousand years before the army of Charlemagne in attempting the invasion of Spain, had been driven back by the Spanish Moors and defeated with great slaughter, and the loss of his best and noblest paladins, including “Roland brave, and Olivier.” The mind of our narrator was carried back to the chivalrous days of the dark ages, and he might almost have listened for ——“The blast of that dread horn On Fontarabian echoes borne The dying hero’s call.”—— It was a clear cool evening—the sun had sunk behind the hills—the roll had been called, the sentinels posted, and the band of the regiment was playing. The English officer, imbued with the subject of his reverie, advanced to request of its leader that beautiful air “Sad and fearful is the story Of the Roncevalles fight,”——