It was but natural that these officers should regard the provincial soldiery with disdain, and that a corresponding resentment should be felt in the provincial ranks. Some of the greatest soldiers of the day were not exempt from this partisan feeling. After the disaster to Braddock’s force in 1755, Washington, who had been present on the field and who contrasted the conduct of the Virginians in the fight with that of the regulars, wrote in the bitterest terms of the latter. Wolfe, on the other hand, had, in 1758, no words strong enough to express his disgust at the shortcomings of the American soldiers. ‘The Americans are in general the dirtiest, most contemptible cowardly dogs that you can conceive.’ If these were the views of the foremost men of the day in the colonial levies and in the regular army respectively, it must be presumed that the lesser men felt at least as strongly. Mrs. Grant, the authoress of ‘Memoirs of an American Lady,’ a book which was published at New York, in 1809, speaks of the ‘secret contempt’ with which ‘many officers justly esteemed, possessed of capacity, learning, and much knowledge, both of the usages of the world and the art of war ... regarded the blunt simplicity and plain appearance of the settlers’; and among the officers who came out from England there must have been a large proportion whose contempt was not unspoken or unnoticed. It was not merely a case of friction between the professional soldier and the amateur, the one looking down upon the other, and the other resenting the airs of the superior person. The mischief was deeper seated. The northern colonies of British America were cradled in centrifugal traditions: a large proportion of the first colonists had come out to be rid of the Home Government, its discipline and its control. Puritanism was the dominant religious and political creed; and the surroundings, except at a few town centres, were of a stern and simple kind. Among men and women born and reared on these lines, and into their family circles, came regimental officers from England, many, if not most, of whom had been bred in the ways of fashionable English Society, which, in the middle of the eighteenth century, was not, to say the least of it, characterised by high tone or scrupulous refinement. The settlers in the New World, by the mere fact of their removal out of the Old World into the wilderness, had preserved for themselves and their descendants the old-time feeling and modes of thought in the Old World, and to them the new leaven from an up-to-date Old World was a leaven of unrighteousness. Mrs. Grant was the daughter of an officer in the 55th Regiment, Howe’s own regiment, but she had spent her childhood in the American atmosphere, and had been mainly brought up in a Dutch family. Consequently she tells us that she was ‘a little ashamed of having a military father,’ and writes of ‘the scarlet coat, which I had been taught to consider as the