DOUGHTY DEEDS

BY R. GRAHAM OF GARTMORE

If doughty deeds my lady please
Right soon I'll mount my steed;
And strong his arm and fast his seat
That bears frae me the meed.
I'll wear thy colours in my cap,
Thy picture at my heart;
And he that bends not to thine eye
Shall rue it to his smart!

If gay attire delight thine eye
I'll dight me in array ;
I'll tend thy chamber door at night
And squire thee all the day.
If sweetest sounds can win thine ear,
These sounds I'll strive to catch;
Thy voice I'll steal to woo thysell,
That voice that nane can match.

But if fond love thy heart can gain,
I'll never break a vow;

Nae maiden lays her skaith to me,

I never loved but you.

For you alone I ride the ring,

For you I wear the blue; For you alone I strive to sing, O tell me how to woo!

Then tell me how to woo thee, Love,

O tell me how to woo thee!
For thy dear sake nae care I'll take,

Tho' ne'er another trow me.

ST. JAMES'S PARK

LEIGH HUNT: The Town.

ONE of the most popular aspects of St. James's Park is that of a military and music-playing and milk-drinking spot. The milk-drinkings, and the bands of music, and the parades, are the same as they used to be in our boyish days; and, we were going to add, may they be immortal. But though it is good to make the best of war as long as war cannot be helped, and though music and gold lace, &c., are wonderful helps to that end, yet conscience will not allow us to blink all we know of a very different sort respecting battlefields and days after the battle. We say, therefore, may war turn out to be as mortal, and speedily so, as railroads and growing good-sense can make it; though in the meantime, and the more for that hope, we may be allowed to indulge ourselves as we did when children, in admiring the pretty figures which it cuts in this place the harmlessness of its glitter and the transports of its beholders. Will anybody who has beheld it when a boy ever forget how his heart leaped within him when, having heard the music before he saw the musicians, he issued hastily from Whitehall on to the parade, and beheld the serene and stately regiment assembled before the colonel, the band playing some noble march, and

the officers stepping forwards to the measure with their saluting swords? Will he ever forget the mystical dignity of the band-major, who made signs with his staff; the barbaric, and as it were, Othellolike height and lustre of the turbaned black who tossed the cymbals; the dapper juvenility of the drummers and fifers; and the astounding prematureness of the little boy who played on the triangle? Is it in the nature of human self-respect to forget how this little boy, dressed in a "right earnest suit of regimentals, and with his hair as veritably powdered and plastered as the best, fetched those amazing strides by the side of Othello, which absolutely "kept up" with his lofty shanks, and made the schoolboy think the higher of his own nature for the possibility? Furthermore, will he ever forget how some regiment of horse used to come over the Park to Whitehall, in the midst of this parade, and pass the foot-soldiers with a sound of clustering magnificence and dancing trumpets? Will he ever forget how the foot then divided itself into companies, and turning about and deploying before the colonel, marched off in the opposite direction, carrying away the schoolboy himself and the crowd of spectators with it; and so, now with the brisk drums and fifes, and now with the deeper glories of the band, marched gallantly off for the courtyard of the palace, where it again set up its music-book, and enchanted the crowd with Haydn or Mozart? What a strange mixture, too, was the crowd itself-boys and grown men, gentlemen, vagabonds, maidservants--there they all went listening, idling, gazing on the ensign

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or the band-major, keeping pace with the march, and all of them more or less, particularly the maidservants, doting on the "sogers." We, for one, confess to having drunk deep of the attraction, or the infection, or the balmy reconcilement (whichever the reader pleases to call it). Many a holiday morning have we hastened from our cloisters in the city to go and hear "the music in the park," delighted to make one in the motley crowd, and attending upon the last flourish of the hautboys and clarionets. There we first became acquainted with feelings which we afterwards put into verse (if the recollection be not thought an impertinence); and there, without knowing what it was called, or who it was that wrote it, we carried back with us to school the theme of a glorious composition, which afterwards became a favourite with opera-goers under the title of Non più andrai, the delightful march in Figaro. We suppose it is now, and has ever since been played there, to the martialisation of hundreds of little boys, and the puzzlement of philosophy. Everything in respect to military parade takes place, we believe, in the park just as it used to do, or with little variation. The objects also which you behold, if you look at the parade and its edifices, are the same. The Admiralty, the Treasury, the back of the Minister's house in Downing Street, and the back-front of the solid and not inappropriate building, called the Horse Guards, look as they did fifty years ago; and there also continue to stand the slender Egyptian piece of cannon, and the dumpy Spanish mortar, trophies of the late war with France. The inscriptions, however, on those