The scarlet uniforms of the First Life Guards passed, and Maestricht, Boyne, the Peninsular, and Waterloo, flashed in view--the regiment which was raised in Holland by King Charles the Second, and was composed of eighty gentlemen, whose sobriquet of the “cheeses,” along with other Life Guards, had been acquired from the contemptuous refusal of their veterans to serve in them when remodelled, because they were no longer composed of gentlemen, but of cheesemongers. Again, the Second Life Guards revived the stained memory of the Stuarts, its own exile in the Netherlands, its return with the restoration; and its sea green facings pleasantly restored for a moment the face of the injured Queen Caroline. Here were the Royal Horse Guards, that inherited, or at least might claim the virtues of the Parliamentary army, which fought with dogmas at the ends of their pike-staffs, and convictions in their hearts. Now passed the First Dragoon Guards, that carried on its proud records the Battle of the Boyne in 1690, Oudenarde in 1708, Malplaquet in 1709, Fontenoy in 1745, Waterloo in 1815, and Pekin in 1860, though to Leacraft’s sensitive mind the last was an inscription of disgrace. The beating hoofs of the “Queen’s Bays,” the Second Dragoon Guards, hurried the reminiscent admirer back to Lucknow and the Indian Mutiny. The nodding plumes of the Prince of Wales, with the Rising Sun, and the Red Dragon which came in view with the Third Dragoon Guards, unfailingly recalled to the custodians of English military renown, that the regiment captured the standard and kettle drums of the Bavarian Guards at the Battle of Ramilies. Trampling on the heels of their horses, the lordly “Blue Horse” defiled past, and the Fifth Dragoon Guards, which supported the vital legend, “_Vestigia nulla retrorsum_,” and which captured four standards at the Battle of Blenheim. Still the endless lines advanced, wavered, stood still, and again with rattling and shivering harness, passed. Now it was the Second Dragoons, the Scotch Greys, raised in Scotland, and older than any other dragoons in the British army, that started the furious applause, an ovation not unintelligently bestowed--for it was they who captured the colors of the French at Ramilies, and their standards at Dettingen. Now it was the “Black Dragoons,” the Sixth, on its glistening horses--once part of the Inniskilling forces, and still bearing as its crest the Castle of Inniskilling; now the Eighth Hussars, whose Protestant fealty had made their founders defenders of William of Orange at the Battle of the Boyne, and who, with signal power, captured forty-four stands of colors and seventy-two guns at the Battle of Leswarree. Now the Fifteenth Hussars, who bore upon their helmets the dazzling inscription, “Five Battalions of French defeated and taken by this Regiment, with their Colors, and nine pieces of cannon, at Emsdorf, 16th of July, 1760.” Swelling hearts greeted the Grenadier Guards, rich in the legacy of the