whilst the French, out of a garrison originally 15,000 strong, had lost in the defence about two-thirds of their number. The engineering skill of these great masters of the art—Coehorn and Vauban, exerted to the utmost on their respective sides—has preserved no more magnificent testimony to their several abilities than is found recorded in the assault and defence. The resolution and ability of Marshal Boufflers, the French Governor, in so gloriously maintaining the defence, is not to be overlooked, but merited a better success. Sterne’s facetious story of “Tristram Shandy”—how questionable so-ever its discretion in our times, yet replete with much that is beautiful, quaint, and true—has borrowed from the ranks of our Borderers its most noted and popular characters, “Uncle Toby,” who was wounded in the groin at this siege of Namur, and his faithful body-servant, “Corporal Trim,” who, two years previously, had been wounded at the battle of Landen; both, by the pen of the author, being life pictures of the veterans of Chelsea. It was during this war that the bayonet, which had been invented by the French, instead of being fixed _inside_ the muzzle of the musket, was first used by the French fixed round the _outside_ of the muzzle, thus enabling the soldier to charge and deliver fire promptly. Grose, in his “Military Antiquities,” thus records the introduction of this improvement:— “In an engagement, during one of the campaigns of King William III. in Flanders, there were three French regiments whose bayonets were made to fix after the present fashion (1690), a contrivance then unknown in the British army; one of them advanced with fixed bayonets against Leven’s (now the Twenty-fifth) regiment, when Lieutenant-Colonel Maxwell, who commanded it, ordered his men to ‘screw bayonets’ into their muzzles, thinking the enemy meant to decide the affair point to point; but to his great surprise, when they came within a proper distance, the French threw in a heavy fire, which for a moment staggered his men, who nevertheless recovered themselves, charged, and drove the enemy out of the line.” On the peace of Ryswick being concluded in 1697, our Borderers, returning home, were quartered in the disturbed districts of the North of Scotland. Nothing of importance falls to be narrated of the regiment until the Rebellion of the Earl of Mar, in 1715, called it to take the field. It was present at the unfortunate battle of Sheriffmuir. The desertion of the Hon. Captain Arthur Elphinstone to the rebel army, however it might have been regretted as casting a shadow over the loyalty of the Twenty-fifth, that doubt has been dispelled, and the lie contradicted, by the exemplary fidelity of the regiment on all occasions. Captain Elphinstone, as Lord Balmarino, in 1746, paid the penalty of his error by his execution on Tower Hill.