A MILITIA GENERAL.* "IN all other countries, and in all former times, a gentleman who would either speak or be listened to on the subject of war, involving subtle criticisms and strategy, and careful reviews of marches, sieges, battles, regular and casual, and irregular onslaughts, would be required to show, first, that he had studied much, investigated fully, and digested the science and history of his subject. But here, sir, no such painful preparation is required: witness the gentleman from Michigan! He has announced to the House that he is a militia general on the peace establishment! 66 Sir, we all know the military studies of the military gentleman from Michigan before he was promoted. I take it to be beyond a reasonable doubt that he had perused with great care the title-page of 'Baron Steuben." Nay, I go further; as the gentleman has incidentally assured us that he is prone to look into musty and neglected volumes, I venture to assert, without vouching in the least from personal knowledge, that he has prosecuted his researches so far as to be able to know that the rear rank stands right behind the front. This I think is fairly inferrible from what I understood him to say of the two lines of encampment at Tippecanoe. Thus we see, Mr. Speaker, that the gentleman from Michigan, being a militia general, as he had told us, his brother officers, in that simple statement has revealed the glorious history of toils, privations, sacrifices, and bloody scenes, through which, we know from experience and observation, a militia officer, in time of peace, is sure to pass. We all, in fancy, now see the gentleman from Michigan in that most dangerous and glorious event in the life of a militia general on the peace establishment - a parade day! That day, for which all the other days of his life seem to have been made. We can see the troops in motion, - umbrellas, hoes, and axe handles, and other like deadly implements of war, overshadowing all the field: when, lo! the leader of the host approaches! 'Far off his coming shines;' From a speech by Thomas Corwin, in Congress, in 1840, in answer to Gen. Crary of Michigan, who on that occasion attacked Gen. Harrison for military mistakes. "His plume which, after the fashion of the great Bourbon, is of awful length, reads its doleful history in the bereaved necks and bosoms of forty neighboring henroosts. Like the great Suwaroff, he seems somewhat careless in forms and points of dress; hence his epaulettes may be on his shoulders, back, or sides, but still gleaming, gloriously gleaming, in the sun. Mounted he is, too, let it not be forgotten. Need I describe to the colonels and generals of this honorable House, the steed which heroes bestride on these occasions? No! I see the memory of other days is with you. You see before you the gentleman from Michigan, mounted on his crop-eared, bushy-tailed mare, the singular obliquity of whose hinder limbs is best described by that most expressive phrase, 'sickle hams’- for height just fourteen hands, all told; yes, sir: there you see his 'steed that laughs at the shaking of the spear; that is his war-horse whose neck is clothed with thunder.' Mr. Speaker, we have glowing descriptions in history of Alexander the Great and his war-horse Bucephalus, at the head of the invincible Macedonian phalanx; but, sir, such are the improvements of modern times that every one must see that our militia general, with his crop-eared mare, with bushy tail and sickle ham, would totally frighten off a battle-field a hundred Alexanders. But, sir, to the history of the parade-day. The general, thus mounted and equipped, is in the field, and ready for action. On the eve of some desperate enterprise, such as giving order to shoulder arms, it may be, there occurs a crisis, one of those accidents of war, which no sagacity could foresee nor prevent. A cloud rises and passes over the sun! Here is an occasion for the display of that greatest of all traits in the history of a commander, the tact which enables him to seize upon and turn to good account unlooked-for events as they arise. Now for the caution wherewith the Roman Fabius foiled the skill and courage of Hannibal ! A retreat is ordered, and troops and general, in a twinkling, are found safely bivouacked in a neighboring grocery. But even here the general still has room for the execution of heroic deeds. Hot from the field, and chafed with the heroic events of the day, your general unsheathes his trenchant blade, eighteen inches in length as you will remember, and with energy and remorseless fury he slices the water-melons that lie in heaps around him, and shares them with his surviving friends. Others of the sinews of war are not wanting here. Whiskey, Mr. Speaker, that great leveller of modern times, is here also, and the shells of the water-melons are filled to the brim. Here again, Mr. Speaker, is shown how the extremes of barbarism and civilization meet. As the Scandinavian heroes of old, after the fatigues of war, drank wine from the skulls of their slaughtered enemies, in Odin's halls, so now our militia general and his forces, from the skulls of the melons thus vanquished, in copious draughts of whiskey assuage the heroic fire of their souls, after a parade-day. But, alas for this short-lived race of ours! all things will have an end, and so it is even with the glorious achievements of our general. Time is on the wing, and will not stay his flight; the sun, as if frightened at the mighty events of the day, rides down the sky, and at the close of the day, when the hamlet is still,' the curtain of night drops upon the scene, 'And Glory, like the phoenix in its fires, ADDRESS OF SPOTTYCUS. Ir had been a circus day in East Kittery Centre. James Myers, the grand and awful tumbler, had amused the populace with the sports of the ring, to an extent hitherto unknown even in that luxurious city. The sounds of cavalry had died away; the roar of the ragged-tailed ourang-outang had ceased; the lanterns had been extinguished. The moon, piercing the impenetrable tissue of woolly clouds, showed her benevolent nature by silvering the brass buttons of a man going across the street, and casting its irradiant beams through an extensive aperture in the canvas, tipped the foam-capped waves in a bucket of dirty water with a wavy, mellowy light. No sound was heard, save the gentle breathings of the elephant, only answered at intervals by the pitiless moanings of the nine-legged calf in the side tent, which had been cruelly deprived of its supper. Under a cart, in one corner, a little band of acrobats were seated, their countenances still dirty from the agony of conflict, tobacco-juice running down their under lips, the daubs of paint still lingering on their brows, when Spottycus, the head clown, limping forth from amid the company, thus addressed them, "Ye call me chief, and ye do well to call him chief, who, for three long weeks, has stumped every man, woman, child, and beast that has entered our show, to fight, and who never yet has run. If there be one among you who can say that ever, in Irish row or private fight, my actions did not confirm my tongue, let him step up and say it. If there be nine in all your company dare face me, let them come on! And yet I was not always thus, a hired buffoon, a scaly chief of still more scaly men. My ancestors came from old Scarborough, and settled among the loose rocks and leafless groves of East Moluncus. My early life ran quiet as the puddle in which I played; and when, at noon, I gathered the hogs beneath the sunshine, and played upon a borrowed tuning-fork, there was a friend, the son of the man that lived in the next house, to join me in the pastime. We let our hogs into the same man's turnip-field, and partook together our rusty meal. One evening, after the hogs and hens were foddered, and we were all seated beneath the currant-bush which shaded our cottage, my great-grandsire, an old man, was telling of Marathon Crossing, and Thermopyla Courthouse, and Lucknow Corner, and the Aroostook war, in which he had been riddled with bullets; and how, on previous occasions, a little band of Choctaws had run before a big army. I knew not, till then, what war was; but then my undimpled cheeks did burn, and to show my new-born fire, I pulled the hair of that venerable man, until my mother, taking me by the nape of the neck, slapped my throbbing chops, and packed me off to bed, bidding me exercise no more my warlike spirit. That night a burglar entered our house. I saw my mother trampled on by the hoof of a big dog, the sleeping form of my father flung amid the blazing rafters of our hog-pen. These insults were too much. I left the vicinity and joined a circus. "To-day, you know, I killed a hydrophobious dog in the arena; and when I gazed intently on him, behold! it was 'old dog Tray,' my old friend's dog. He made one pass at me, bit a farewell hunk out of my leg, kicked, and died, — the same tail, shorter only by six inches, which he used to wear when he and his master and I, in adventurous infancy, scaled the picket-fence to pluck the first ripe potato-balls, and bear them home in childish exultation! I told the proprietor that the deceased had been my friend's dog, homely, faithful, and kind, and I begged that I might convey away the carcass to a taxidermist, and sell the skin for nippers.' Ay! upon my head, amid the blood and mud of the arena, I begged that poor boon, while all the assembled maids and mothers, and the scrabble, shouted in derision; deeming it rare sport, forsooth, to see the prince of clowns turn red and grumble about that piece of bleeding dog-flesh. And the proprietor drew back, as I were dilution, and sternly said, 'Let the beast alone! It shall not be mee (a) t for you.' And so, fellow-acrobats, rusty cusses, clowns, must you as well as I be bluffed by these covetous proprietors. O Rum, Rum! thou hast been a tender nurse to me. Ay! thou hast given to that indigent, unostentatious hog-boy, who never heard a louder noise than a thunderbolt, cast-iron muscles, and a heart of brick, taught him to run his hands within the mails and pocket cash, to run his sword against brick buildings and stone walls, to gaze into the bleared eyeballs of the fierce Khamscatkan woodpecker, even as a young lady upon an intimate cat! And he shall pay thee back as soon as the yellow Paddygumpus shall turn red as frothing logwood, and in its deepest juice the codfish lie cradled! "Ye stand there now like rowdies, as ye are! There is no tin within your gaping pockets; and to-morrow, or next day, some rustic Polyphemus, breathing of onions from his infinite mouth, shall with his freckled fingers point at your red noses, and bet a three-cent piece on your head. Hark! Hear ye yon giraffe roaring in his hen-coop? 'Tis six weeks since he has tasted food; but to-morrow they will, as likely as not, give him your breakfast, and miserable fodder will it be for him, by the way. If ye know nothing at all, scarcely, work then like dogs, for almost nothing and board! If ye are men, follow me; leave the concern, run off with the horses, and set up for yourselves, as your ancestral grandfathers did at old Spoodinkum. Is Scarborough dead? Is the old New England' that you drank to-day dried up within your bowels, that do skulk and squat, like a be-horsewhipped pup beneath his master's barn? low comrades, rusticusses, clowns! if we must turn inside out, let us do it for ourselves! If we must turn summersets 6 ye O fel |