can march to battle singing Luther's hymns. 
Frenchmen will work themselves into a frenzy
by a song of glory and of Fatherland. Our
martial poets need not trouble to imitate---or at
least need not imagine that if they do so they
will ever supply a want to the British soldier. 
Our sailors working the heavy guns in South
Africa sang: ``Here's another lump of sugar
for the Bird.'' I saw a regiment go into action
to the refrain of ``A little bit off the top.'' The
martial poet aforesaid, unless he had the genius
and the insight of a Kipling, would have wasted
a good deal of ink before he had got down to
such chants as these. The Russians are not
unlike us in this respect. I remember reading
of some column ascending a breach and singing
lustily from start to finish, until a few survivors
were left victorious upon the crest with the song
still going. A spectator inquired what wondrous
chant it was which had warmed them to
such a deed of valour, and he found that the
exact meaning of the words, endlessly repeated,
was ``Ivan is in the garden picking cabbages.''
The fact is, I suppose, that a mere monotonous
sound may take the place of the tom-tom of
savage warfare, and hypnotize the soldier into
valour.

  Our cousins across the Atlantic have the
same blending of the comic with their most
serious work. Take the songs which they sang
during the most bloody war which the Anglo-Celtic
race has ever waged---the only war in
which it could have been said that they were
stretched to their uttermost and showed their
true form---``Tramp, tramp, tramp,'' ``John
Brown's Body,'' ``Marching through Georgia''
---all had a playful humour running through
them. Only one exception do I know, and that
is the most tremendous war-song I can recall. 
Even an outsider in time of peace can hardly
read it without emotion. I mean, of course,
Julia Ward Howe's ``War-Song of the Republic,''
with the choral opening line: ``Mine
eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the
Lord.'' If that were ever sung upon a battle-field
the effect must have been terrific.

  A long digression, is it not? But that is the
worst of the thoughts at the other side of the
Magic Door. You can't pull one out without
a dozen being entangled with it. But it was
Scott's soldiers that I was talking of, and I was
saying that there is nothing theatrical, no posing,
no heroics (the thing of all others which the hero
abominates), but just the short bluff word and
the simple manly ways, with every expression and
metaphor drawn from within his natural range
of thought. What a pity it is that he, with his
keen appreciation of the soldier, gave us so little
of those soldiers who were his own contemporaries---
the finest, perhaps, that the world has
ever seen! It is true that he wrote a life of the
great Soldier Emperor, but that was the one
piece of hackwork of his career. How could a
Tory patriot, whose whole training had been
to look upon Napoleon as a malignant Demon,
do justice to such a theme? But the Europe of
those days was full of material which he of all
men could have drawn with a sympathetic hand. 
What would we not give for a portrait of one of
Murat's light-cavalrymen, or of a Grenadier
of the Old Guard, drawn with the same bold
strokes as the Rittmeister of Gustavus or the
archers of the French King's Guard in ``Quentin
Durward''?

  In his visit to Paris Scott must have seen
many of those iron men who during the preceding
twenty years had been the scourge and also
the redemption of Europe. To us the soldiers
who scowled at him from the sidewalks in 1814
would have been as interesting and as much
romantic figures of the past as the mail-clad
knights or ruffling cavaliers of his novels. A
picture from the life of a Peninsular veteran,
with his views upon the Duke, would be as
striking as Dugald Dalgetty from the German
wars. But then no man ever does realize the
true interest of the age in which he happens to
live. All sense of proportion is lost, and the
little thing hard-by obscures the great thing at a
distance. It is easy in the dark to confuse the
fire-fly and the star. Fancy, for example, the
Old Masters seeking their subjects in inn parlours,
or St. Sebastians, while Columbus was
discovering America before their very faces.

  I have said that I think ``Ivanhoe'' the best
of Scott's novels. I suppose most people would