SHAKSPEARE.

At daybreak, the bustle of the camp awoke me.  I rose hastily, mounted my horse, and spurred to the rendezvous of the general staff.  Nothing could be more animated than the scene before me, and which spread to the utmost reach of view.  The advance of the combined forces had moved at early dawn, and the columns were seen far away, ascending the sides of a hilly range by different routes, sometimes penetrating through the forest, and catching the lights of a brilliant rising sun on their plumes and arms.  The sound of their trumpets and bands was heard from time to time, enriched by the distance, and coming on the fresh morning breeze, with something of its freshness, to the ear and the mind.  The troops now passing under the knoll on which the commander-in-chief and his staff had taken their stand, were the main body, and were Austrian, fine-looking battalions, superbly uniformed, and covered with military decorations, the fruits of the late Turkish campaigns, and the picked troops of an empire of thirty millions of men.  Nothing could be more brilliant, novel, or picturesque, than the display of this admirable force, as it moved in front of the rising ground on which our cortege stood.

“You will now see,” said Varnhorst, who sat curbing, with no slight difficulty, his fiery Ukraine charger at my side, “the troops of countries of which Europe, in general, knows no more than of the tribes of the new world.  The Austrian sceptre brings into the field all the barbaric arms and costumes of the border land of Christendom and the Turk.”

Varnhorst, familiar with every service of the continent, was a capital cicerone, and I listened with strong interest as he pronounced the names, and gave little characteristic anecdotes, of the gallant regiments that successively wheeled at the foot of the slope—­the Archducal grenadiers—­the Eugene battalion, which had won their horse-tails at the passage of the Danube—­the Lichtensteins, who had stormed Belgrade—­the Imperial Guard, a magnificent corps, who had led the last assault on the Grand Vizier’s lines, and finished the war.  The light infantry of Maria Theresa, and the Hungarian grenadiers and cuirassiers, a mass of steel and gold, closed the march of the main body.  Nothing could be more splendid.  And all this was done under the perpetual peal of trumpets, and the thunder of drums and gongs, that seemed absolutely to shake the air.  It was completely the Miltonic march and harmony—­

    “Sonorous metal blowing martial sounds.”

But I was now to witness a still more spirit-stirring scene.

The trampling of a multitude of horse, and the tossing of lances and banners in the distance, suddenly turned all eyes in their direction.