Stick stout to orders, messmates,
      We’ll plunder, burn, and sink,
    Then, France, have at your first-rates,
      For Britons never shrink: 
    We’ll rummage all we fancy,
      We’ll bring them in by scores,
    And Moll and Kate and Nancy
      Shall roll in louis-d’ors.

It was long before this spirit died out.  Twenty-two years after the battle of Waterloo, when, on the occasion of the coronation of Queen Victoria, Marshal Soult visited England and it was suggested that the Duke of Wellington should propose the health of the French army at a public dinner, he replied:  “D——­ ’em.  I’ll have nothing to do with them but beat them.”

Inspiriting songs, such as “When Johnny comes marching home” and “The British Grenadiers,” which, Mr. Stone informs us, “cannot be older than 1678, when the Grenadier Company was formed, and not later than 1714, when hand-grenades were discontinued,” abundantly testify to the fact that the British soldier has also not lacked poets to vaunt his prowess.  Many of the military songs have served as a distinct stimulus to recruiting, and possibly some of them were written with that express object in view.  Sir Ian Hamilton, in his preface to Mr. Stone’s collection of War Songs, says, “The Royal Fusiliers are the heroes of a modern but inspiriting song, ‘Fighting with the 7th Royal Fusiliers.’  It was composed in the early ’nineties, and produced such an overwhelming rush of recruits that the authorities could easily, had they so chosen, have raised several additional battalions.”  The writer of the present article remembers in his childhood to have learnt the following lines from his old nurse, who was the widow of a corporal in the army employed in the recruiting service: 

    ’Twas in the merry month of May,
      When bees from flower to flower do hum,
    And soldiers through the town march gay,
      And villagers flock to the sound of the drum. 
    Young Roger swore he’d leave his plough,
      His team and tillage all begun;
    Of country life he’d had enow,
      He’d leave it all and follow the drum.

The British military has perhaps been somewhat less happily inspired than the naval muse.  Nevertheless the army can boast of some good poetry.  “Why, soldiers, why?” the authorship of which is sometimes erroneously attributed to Wolfe, is a fine song, and the following lines written by an unknown author after the crushing blow inflicted on Lord Galway’s force at Almanza, in 1707, display that absence of discouragement after defeat which is perhaps one of the most severe tests by which the discipline and spirit of an army can be tried: 

    Let no brave soldier be dismayed
      For losing of a battle;
    We have more forces coming on
      Will make Jack Frenchman rattle.

Abundant evidence might be adduced to show that the British soldier is amenable to poetic influences.  Sir Adam Fergusson, writing to Sir Walter Scott on August 31, 1811, said that the canto of the Lady of the Lake describing the stag hunt “was the favourite among the rough sons of the fighting Third Division,” and Professor Courthope in his History of English Poetry quotes the following passage from Lockhart’s Life of Scott: