phosphoric or chemical matches, and the splints only were admitted. The information obtained on that occasion, however, shewed that the lucifer manufacture in Germany began at Darmstadt about 1834, and spread thence to almost every part of the German dominions. The small duchy of Hesse Darmstadt alone had, in 1850, eight large manufactories of these trifles, producing half a million boxes weekly. These boxes were not such as we buy at a fraction of a penny each; they were rather cases containing from a thousand to five thousand matches. Austria and Bavaria, as if tired of any longer counting up the boxes, sold their matches by thousands of hundredweights. The German catalogue of our Exhibition notified the prices of the German splints and matches, and those prices, when translated into English, were certainly something curious. Peter Harass sold lucifer boxes (empty) at twopence per hundred. Manufacturers in Saxony sold untipped matches at the rate of fourteen hundred for a farthing. Fürth of Schültenhofen sold finished tipped matches at a penny per dozen boxes. Bittner of Nendorf supplied untipped splints at nine thousand for a penny; but Fürth eclipsed him by raising this number to fifteen thousand. One of the journals devoted to chemical science has recently given curious information concerning matches, from which we learn that the trade is extending rapidly in all directions. We are told, among other wonders, that Pollak of Vienna, and the Fürth above mentioned, now employ so many hands, that they produce nearly a thousand million matches weekly; that Sweden sends us thirty thousand cuts of matchsplints yearly; that one English merchant now buys eight thousand cuts of foreign match-splints yearly; that a single firm in Lancashire employs four hundred hands, keeps ten thousand pounds' worth of timber always on hand, uses every week a ton of sulphur and a ton of glue, and produces weekly more than forty million matches-enough to engirdle the earth and leave a few to spare.

A POLITE French gentleman who had meant no harm was once knocked down by an ancient English civilian because he had called him a non-combatant. No Briton,' urged the latter (in extenuation of his hasty conduct), no matter what his profession or his age, should ever be called a non-combatant, or anything like it, and least of all by a Frenchman.' Our venerable countryman had sinew and humour upon his side of the argument, but his reasoning was very defective. Some of the bravest men the world has produced have been non-combatants, and some of the most heroic deeds in its history have been performed, not by the destroyers of their species, but by the healers and preservers thereof. There was not a more valiant work done in all the Crimean war than that undertaken by Surgeon Thomson after Alma. There was not a more dauntless man in the whole Grand Army of Napoleon than its surgeon-in-chief, Baron Larrey.

tended friend and foe with equal care) on both sides, in the bloody arbitrament of war. History has long concerned herself with the victors and the vanquished only, and not without reason; since, to receive a severe wound, in the case of a common soldier, was, under the old régime, almost certainly to die. It was only the chiefs that were much attended to, or who lived to fight another day' at all. Yet in Larrey's time, so much had these things been changed for the better, that he sent forth Napoleon from Moscow with more than 100,000 able-bodied men, who had entered that city, fatal as it was in other respects, with only 90,000 combatants. The means, however, by which patients are recovered in warfare are often strange enough, and the remedies applied not a little violent. In the woodless wastes of Egypt, the sick were warmed at night by fires which were made of the bones of the dead. When the army got to Cairo, it fell into the hideous embraces of the plague, whose only merit was that it extinguished, like death itself, all other diseases. When the plague ceased, fatigues and privations under a burning sun excited liver complaint, which degener ated into abscesses so terrible, that it was sometimes found necessary to plunge some sharp instrument into the stomach, in order to give free course to suppuration. The lesser diseases of that Egyptian campaign were leprosy, caught from infected mattresses and unclean food, ophthalmia, scurvy, and elephantiasis. Dark, indeed, was the side of Bellona's shield which it was the life-long fate of Surgeon Larrey to contemplate. The personal safety, too, of this noncombatant was jeopardised in every engagement. His amputations were performed amid a shower of bullets, and in expectation of the charge of hostile cavalry. Among the wounded was General Silly, whose knee was ground by a bullet. Larrey, perceiving that fatal results might ensue unless the limb was amputated at once, proposed amputation. The general consented to the operation, which was performed under the enemy's fire in the space of three minutes. But lo! the English cavalry suddenly near their side. What, then, was to become of the French surgeon and his patient? "I had scarce time," said Larrey, "to place the wounded officer on my shoulders, and to carry him rapidly away towards our army, which was in full retreat. I spied a series of ditches, some of them planted with caper bushes, across which I passed, while the cavalry were obliged to go by a more circuitous route in that intersected country. Thus I had the happiness to reach the rear-guard of our army before this corps of dragoons. At length I arrived with this honourably wounded officer at Alexandria, where I completed his cure.'

At

On many battle-fields, the cold was so intense that the instruments requisite for the operations fell from the powerless hands of the army-surgeons; after others, nothing could be procured but horse-flesh to make soup for the exhausted patients, while their only tureens were the cuirasses of the fallen. Smolensk, where all supplies and stores had been burned by the retreating Russians, Larrey, fertile in expedients, discovered a hoard of archives, and substituted paper for lint, and the thick parchment for splints. His wounded were then upwards of ten thousand in number, and almost all the town in conflagration. At Eylau, these poor fellows were wellnigh meeting with a second calamity, which would without doubt have destroyed the whole of them.

* Renshaw. London, 1861.

tions, I heard on all sides of me the most pressing appeals to me from the sufferers. To the doleful moans of these intrepid soldiers succeeded, after the operation, a prodigious and almost inexplicable calm, along with a kind of internal satisfaction, which they expressed by testimonies of the most lively gratitude. They appeared no longer occupied by their personal evils; they made vows for the preservation of our emperor and the success of our arms; finally, they

mutually encouraged each other to bear patiently the different operations which their wounds rendered necessary. It was in the midst of all the obstacles which a hostile locality and a rigorous temperature were presenting, that some of the most delicate and difficult operations were performed successfully. Just at the moment when a veritable consolation was diffusing itself in the soul of every wounded man, an unexpected effort made by the right wing of the enemy to outflank our left, precisely at the point where the ambulances were stationed, was calculated to spread trouble among these distressed men. Already some who were able to march had taken flight; others were making vain efforts to follow them, and escape this unexpected attack. We, how ever, were their prop and support; we were determined to die rather than to seek ignominious safety. I expressed forcibly to all the wounded who remained the resolution which I had taken not to abandon my post; I assured them that, whatever might be the result of this alarm, which to me appeared false, they had nothing to fear for their life. All the members of my own department rallied round me, and swore not to abandon me. Presently, an impetuous charge, purposely made upon the enemy which had been threatening us, in midst of dense whirlwinds of snow, prevented the event so dreaded by our wounded men. Calm was re-established, and it became possible for the medical officers to continue uninterruptedly their operations. All the more serious wounds of the Imperial Guard and a great part of the line were treated and operated on during the first twelve hours; then only did any of the surgeons begin to take rest. We passed the remainder of the night on the ice and snow around the fire of the bivouac of the ambulances. Never had there been so hard a day for me: it had been hardly possible for me to restrain my tears in those moments when I was endeavouring to sustain the courage of my soldier-patients.'

A more Catholic-hearted man than Larrey never breathed; a fellow-creature had only to need his professional assistance, and whether Englishman, Austrian, or Russian, he was his friend at once. He held that a surgeon had no enemies except disease and death, and on one occasion almost perished of a malignant fever contracted from some countrymen of our own who were prisoners to the French in Spain. With the armies of his beloved master, Napoleon, Larrey visited in turn almost every country in Europe, of each of which he has something novel to say, since his view of all things is taken from so unusual a stand-point; but the most striking of all his experiences is without doubt his narrative of the campaign in Russia. During that awful expedition, the surgeon-in-chief of the Grand Army went on foot. Cold, he had convinced himself, was only the predisposing cause of frost-bite, and the heat which succeeds the cold the real source of mischief. Those who rode, apon arriving motionless at a bivouac, experienced an irrepressible desire to warm themselves, and on approaching a fire contracted gangrene in their halffrozen limbs. In all other countries through which the French passed as invaders, it was Larrey's custom, upon evacuating a town, to leave a letter for the medical chief of the enemy, commending to his care such of his own unhappy patients as were too ill to be moved; and in no case was this confidence found to be misplaced. But in Russia every town was set on fire before Napoleon reached it, and consumed almost to the last house before he departed. Where the Grand Army looked for abundance, and rest, and shelter, they found nothing but flames. The hope of reaching their great goal, Moscow, however, animated them to an extraordinary degree, notwithstanding that the four hundred thousand fighting-men who had crossed the Niemen were reduced to less than a quarter of that number.

'At length, on the 14th of September, on reaching an eminence in the road, the advanced-guard suddenly caught sight of Moscow. As all the battalions of the army reached that part of the road, they halted, and the sound of "Moscow" reverberated through their ranks. It was a moment of intoxication. After a short halt, they continued their onward course; and as the old city of the czars of Muscovy became brighter and clearer, the joy of the French soldiers increased. Murat, at the head of the cavalry, galloped forward, and concluded a truce with the enemy for the evacuation of Moscow. The whole French army soon afterwards began to enter the gates of that city. The French soldiers dispersed themselves through the town, and gazed at its novelties. The houses were richly furnished, the churches were profuse in ornament, and the palaces seemed stored with the wealth of ages. Afterwards, some of them climbed to the summit of the Kremlin. From that spot, they looked down upon a city which in extent seemed as large as Paris, Vienna, and Berlin together. Beneath them, in survey, were 1500 palaces, with gardens and parks, and thousands of houses of a perfectly new architecture, tiled or roofed with polished iron of various devices. From the midst of these abodes arose hundreds of churches and innumerable steeples. Conceptions the most eccentric, of Byzantine, Tartar, and Armenian architecture, had there raised edifices, with twisted columns in front of them, and also produced a variety of contour and painting. Many of the houses were of coloured wood; but the colours were unmatched and incongruous. Then the silvered and gilded cupolas of the principal churches, in reflecting the rays of the sun, gave to this panorama much that was dazzling as well as new to French eyes. Commanding and overlooking all, by its gilded roof of immense height, and by its towers almost laden with steeples, with its walls carved or sculptured like garlands, the Kremlin, in its imposing grandeur, appeared like the father and protector of the old Muscovite city.'

In this Kremlin, the citadel of the capital, the abode of the czars, which contained their treasure, the sacred images of the Greek religion, and the mortal remains of the sovereigns laid out in funeral chapels, adorned with gold and gems, Napoleon took up his quarters. His soldiers, who had long been strangers to a bed, that night slept on soft couches in mansions of the noble and wealthy. They were dreaming of enriching themselves by the spoil of those luxuriant but forsaken abodes, when the torches of the incendiaries-the felons who had been liberated from prison, and left behind for this dread purpose--were applied to the holy city. The gales of the equinox acted like a bellows on the rising conflagration. The polished steel roofs of the buildings soon became red hot, balloons of fire drifted to and fro, and the air resounded with the falling of walls and springing of mines. Napoleon clung to the spot as long as possible; but at length the increasing fury of the flames rendered it quite untenable, and he removed-not without great peril in passing through the burning streets-to Pétrowskoié, a château of Peter the Great, about four miles from the city. For three days and nights, the fire raged, consuming the entire capital except the Kremlin, the churches, and a few of the large stone houses. Napoleon surveyed the scene from his château, and was overheard by Larrey to exclaim: "This event is the presage of a long train of disasters.' As soon as possible, the emperor returned to the place where Moscow had stood. The camps which he traversed,' says M. de Segur, 'in order to arrive at the Kremlin, offered a singular aspect. They were on thick and cold mud, in the midst of fields. Here the soldiers were warming themselves by igniting furniture of acacia, windows of handsome framework, and doors of rich gilding. Around these fires, on a litter of damp straw, which

was badly sheltered by some planks, one saw the soldiers and their officers, soiled with mud and blackened with smoke, sitting in arm-chairs, or sleeping on sofas of silk. At their feet were stretched or heaped up shawls of cashmere, the most rare furs of Siberia, and also stuffs of gold of Persia. Between the camps and the town, one met crowds of soldiers dragging or trailing their booty, or chasing before them, as beasts of burden, moujiks bent under the weight of the pillage of their capital, for the fire shewed near 20,000 inhabitants, unperceived till then, in this immense city. They went to shelter themselves with the wreck of their goods near our fires. They lived pell-mell with our soldiers, protected by some, and tolerated or scarce remarked by others. There were even about 10,000 soldiers of the enemy. During several days, they wandered in the midst of us, free, and some of them still armed.'

Having deferred as long as possible the evacuation of Moscow, on account of the loss of prestige which he knew must result from any retrograde movement, and despairing of any conditions of peace from Alexander, Napoleon commenced his retreat. The 103,000 men who yet remained to him carried with them an immense plunder, beside that famous and gigantic cross snatched from the tower of the great Ivan, which the emperor fondly hoped to see erected on the dome of the Invalides at Paris. They were also accompanied by many French families who had long resided in Russia, but were now apprehensive of being left behind. The dreadful story of this retreat has been told again and again. Before the French could effect their passage across the Beresina, the Russians arrived in enormous force, and began to fire upon the division of General Partoureaux, the soldiers of which division immediately wished to cross the bridge all at once. The conveyances clashed with each other. Some of the unfortunate men were crushed, while others, losing all spirit, threw themselves into the stream; some opened a cruel way for themselves by massacring all who obstructed their passage. Shrieks of women, cries of despair, roar of cannon, noise of explosions, and a variety of sounds, were all heard together. A certain number, in the abyss of despair, sat on the banks half stupified, and, after gazing as if they scarce saw, died of prostration. There was throughout a frightful mixture of imprecations, of clashings, and of strugglings; thence arose indescribable disorder, and a breaking of the overloaded bridge. The Russian army approached, and with its formidable artillery tore the ranks of the French mob of soldiers.' In this immense disaster, the surgeon-in-chief, after having crossed over with the Imperial Guard, discovered that requisites for the sick and wounded of his countrymen had been left on the opposite bank. With equal humanity and heroism, he recrossed the stream; and hardly had he done so, when he was surrounded by a wildly excited crowd. He was almost suffocated in the midst of it. It is here that one may find proof of that unbounded affection with which Larrey had inspired the soldiers with whom he was serving. No sooner was he recognised, than he was carried with astonishing rapidity in the arms of the soldiers across the river. parts was heard the cry nearly in these words: "Let us save him who saved us!

On all

The sufferings of the remnant of the Grand Army became now extreme; neither rank nor nationality could be recognised in their diminished columns. Those rags which had been uniforms were scorched by the fires of the bivouacs, and their feet were wrapped up in bits of cloth instead of shoes and stockings. Even their very ages were confounded, for the beards of youth and age were equally whitened by the hoar-frost, and all went stumbling on in apparent decrepitude. So fatal was the cold, that of the 12,000 men forming the twelfth division of the

army, all had perished between Wilna and Ochmiana save 350! At Miedneski, the cold was so great that Larrey found it was 28 degrees on the thermometer of Reaumur, which was suspended to his coatbutton. It seemed a region in which all life died, death lived; for, as the army of skeletons passed onwards, they observed numbers of dead birds, which, doubtless in their flight towards the centre of Europe, had been overtaken by the winter, and had fallen at once, stiffened by the cold, on the very track which the retreating French were now pursuing. The silence of their march was broken occasionally by the weak voice of some comrade as he sank, never to rise, on the snow-clad earth.' Even the Russians themselves fared little better. The 120,000 men of Kutusoff melted down to 35,000; and the 50,000 of Wittgenstein to 15,000. Nay, so benumbed and stupified were these natives by the cold of their own winter, that they were incapable of distinguishing the French prisoners who marched in the middle of their columns. Many of these were so audacious as to attack isolated parties of Russians, and make themselves masters of their arms and uniforms, after which they would join the enemy's ranks without being detected.

Larrey's iron constitution endured all the hardships of this campaign without much detriment: the spirit was ever willing with him, and the flesh was not weak. His moral courage, too, was fully equal to his physical. Long ago at Esslingen, when the officers of the staff complained to Napoleon of their horses having been shot by command of the surgeon-in-chief, he had been summoned to the emperor's presence. 'What!' said the latter, 'have you ventured, on your own responsibility, to dispose of my officers' horses for food for your wounded?' Yes,' answered Larrey, nor did he add another word to that monosyllable. For this reply, his master, who was not of the silver-fork school of sovereigns, created him a baron of the empire.

As no man ever merited honour and promotion more than Larrey, so none was ever less grudged the possession of them. The name of this non-combatant hero is engraved on the stone of the Arc de Triomphe with those of the illustrious soldiers of the Republic and the Empire. His statue stands in the Court of Honour in the military hospital of the Val de Grâce at Paris. His works, forming the connectinglink between the surgery of the last age and the present, are also themselves a monument. Finally, there is this noble record of him in the will of Napoleon his master, who had an eye for an honest man, although he could scarcely himself be classed in the category of such: 'I bequeath to the surgeon-in-chief of the French army, Larrey, 100,000 francs. He is the most virtuous man I have ever known.'

Buttons gloomily, for these continual mistakes have affected even his once exuberant spirits.

'Is this here Glo'ster Terriss?' inquires another misguided wanderer in a minute or two.

Our page does not deign to answer in words; but making a circular movement with his arm to represent a Crescent, and pointing to the corner of the opposite house, on which Gloucester Crescent is displayed in enormous characters, he sardonically dismisses the inquirer.

Butter, intended for I know not whom, grows rancid in this establishment, while waiting for the legitimate owners to send for it; game becomes uncommonly high; the moth even gets into new but unclaimed clothes, which have been left at the door without remark by whistling tailor-boys. There is a certain cupboard into which all this double Glo'ster property is thrust, and waits till called for. A less rigidly scrupulous man than I might clothe and feed himself and family quite gratuitously out of this heterogeneous stock. Alas for our fallen nature, this is the true reason, perhaps, why the Imbecile has been so long permitted to call all things Glo'ster without remonstrance. One-fourth of the human race (or nearly so) are concerned in the matter, and a large proportion of these are probably rogues. And yet the dishonest must themselves suffer something in their turn. It is very nice to get other people's turbot and lobster-sauce; but when other people get ours, and we happen to have friends to dine that day, the mistake is robbed of half its charm. To have one's little bills sent in to one's neighbour instead of one's self, is a very soothing circumstance; but when the cheque for our quarter's salary goes astray, it depresses one's spirits.

I have borne these things long and patiently, in common with a quarter of a million (or so) of my fellow-creatures, but there is a limit to all endurance. The trodden worm, if you tread upon him with hobnails, will turn; and hobnails have been employed with a vengeance in the case of the present writer. Not content with their double and treble Glo'sters, the Board of Works has christened, or permitted to be christened, a street in our immediate neighbourhood by the name of Gloucester Crescent North. The original Imbecile must have been egged on to this piece of egregious folly by some new hand; his unassisted intellect could scarcely have devised so ingenious a method of confusion. Some practical joker, I repeat, must have got admitted to the Board of late years, and perpetrated this Gloucester Crescent North; for, imprimis, it is not a crescent at all, but a straight street; and, secondly, it does not happen to be north of us, but west. One-half of this anomalous erection does, I believe, refuse to be designated by so inappropriate a name, and calls itself a Square; but with that piece of harmless eccentricity I have nothing to do, since it does not call itself Glo'ster. It is with the other half that my unappeasable quarrel lies. Its inhabitants absorb every description of alien property, from fireguards to American goloshes. Nothing comes amiss to their felonious appetites, from Turkeys sent to us from the country, to Bonbons for our Christmas trees. On the other hand, we are most unfortunate in the things we get in exchange. For a whole fortnight, I partook regularly of a medicine, the only effect of which was to turn my complexion to a light blue, whereas the tonic which was applicable to my little derangement was imposed upon some one suffering some horrible complaint in Gloucester Crescent North; the numbers of our respective houses

being identical, and the chemist having confounded the Crescents.

Again, in consequence of the great System of True Merit Rewarded being as yet unestablished in this sublunary sphere, I do not happen to keep a carriage, but hire a Brougham upon those occasions when society demands that my wife should perform the great social paper-hunt-that is, drive about leaving cards. Now, with each new Brougham there is a new driver; and each new driver, by some demoniacal instinct, drives to the house which correOpposponds to ours in Gloucester Crescent North. site that door he sits for hours, nodding and blinking most magnificent apparel, sits my wife, waiting in vain as only coachmen can; and up in her drawing-room, in for him to come. The individual who suffers for this sort of thing in the end is, as every Paterfamilias knows, the husband, who receives no inconsiderable portion of those remonstrances-let us call them—which are properly the due of the Board of Works and its Imbecile. On the other hand, persons of both sexes, and to our first floor, where, after being received with all heights of fashion, are constantly being shewn up silent courtesy, they sit expectant for twenty minutes or so, and then inquire whether Mrs X. (a totally unknown lady) will soon be down or no?

I will conclude with a fearful example of this class of incident, wherein the mistake was gigantic in its proportions, and the circumstances weird and unnatural in the highest degree.

It was about half-past six on a very stormy day in January last; my wife and I were alone in the drawing-room, waiting for our tête-à-tête dinner to be announced. I had my slippers on, and all things portended a domestic evening. I hugged myself, as the hail dashed against the windows, that there was no occasion for patent-leather boots and companymanners for that night, at all events.

But there came a double knock at the door.

'Goodness gracious!' cried my wife, rising and mechanically arranging her hair in the pier-glass, 'who on earth can that be?'

'Gloucester Crescent North people, of course,' said I yawning: that makes the seventh mistake since I came back from the city.'

'Hush!' replied she; they are actually coming upstairs.'

At the same moment that the cab drove rapidly away (it was a cab, for I heard its windows rattle), the door was opened, and a male and female entered in the fullest evening costume. They were goodhumoured elderly people, very pleasant to look upon, but it was the first time that we had ever set eyes on them.

'We thought that we never should have found you half an hour late for dinner, are we not? But we out,' exclaimed the lady beamingly; why, we're quite forgot the number, and you being new-comers, why, your address was not in the Red Book.'

They shook hands so heartily with us both, that we could not but return their salutation with some warmth; and as for any explanation, the old lady never gave us a chance of putting in a syllable edgeways.

I suppose, my love, you scarcely recollect me at all?' pursued she, chucking my wife under the chin: 'you were such a little thing when I saw you lastnot that high: and as for your husband-such a beard as he's got too!-why, the very last time I met him, I dandled him on my lap, and gave him a Noah's Ark. He's got just the same eyes, however, as he used to have, the very image of his poor mother's; but his hair has grown darker, and has lost a little bit of its curl. Law, Harry [my wife's name was Harriet], you should have seen him in his little black velvet frock and red ribbons, with his fat little arms and legs quite'

At this point in the reminiscence, I fell into such