SIR JAMES CAMPBELL'S MEMOIRS.

THESE are the Memoirs of a man who saw pretty nearly as much of the world as falls to the lot of most enterprising mortals. In point

of length of life, he was also greatly favoured : Sir JAMES CAMP- BELL was born in the year of the Rebellion, 45 ; and was actively engaged in the battle of Minden; since which time lie has not

ceased to go in search of adventures, or to meet with them : and if he has now ceased to exist, it must have been but lately, and at an advanced but still robust age. To be the eldest of seventeen children, is nearly as bad as being a younger son in ordinary cases.

"The Younger Son" himself, whose wild and roving life we lately noticed, had been scarcely more tossed about than Sir JAMES CAMPBELL—or Colonel CALLANDER, the name he was longest and best known by. He was in fact engaged or connected with almost every great event from the Seven t'Years' War down to the takino.'' of Paris. Sir JAMES CAMPBELL was the son of Mr. CALLANDER of Craig- forth ; a gentleman whom his son describes as devoted to litera- ture and the arts, but who, from indolence and carelessness, neglected his estate, and certainly did not improve it by quartering seventeen children upon it. The name of CAMPBELL and estates of Ardkinglas, JAMES inherited, late in life, through his mother, from her grandfather, Sir JAMES CAMPBELL, who had strictly en- tailed the property. An income of seven or eight hundred a-year, made it incumbent on Mr. CALLANDER to send his children forth to seek their fortunes ; and the Army naturally opens her ranks to a, gentleman and a Scotsman. At twelve-years of. age, young CALLANDER was an ensign ; and at fourteen, "ducking his head," as he tells us, at the battle of Minden. After the engagement, the youth went to pay his respects to Lord GEORGE SACKVILLE, to whom he had been recommended ; and was unlucky enough, in referring to the events of the day,'to ask, "But where was the cavalry all the time ?" This unconscious morsel of piquancy spread through the army : it was asked of Lord GEORGE, more seriously, at his court-martial. In the subsequent campaigns, the young ensign made himself useful to General Mosryx, the Com- mander-in-Chief of the cavalry, at that time high in the confidence of the King (GEORGE the Second), by speaking German and interpreting for him ; a circumstance which recommended him as his aide-de-camp, and had great influence over his future for- t:mesa At the battle of Warbourg, CALLANDER had his horse killed under him, and was wounded in live different places ; which put him hors de combat for nearly the rest of the campaign. He was able, however, to resume at the attack on Zerenberg, which was headed by one of those remarkable men sometimes found even in our army—the famous old Colonel PRESTON, of the Scots Greys : he had been originally a drummer, and was well known for his exploits. He with a few men once cut his way through a regi- ment of French cavalry, when he used his sword with such ''()Tod will, that his hand swelled in the basket hilt so that it could not be extracted without forcing open the bars. This man was per- haps the last that wore a butt' jerkin under his uniform : in the charge mentioned, his jerkin was cut in a dozen places, but never slashed. After the affair of Zerenberg, CALLANDER was made adjutant to the Second Dragoon Guards.' He had not then been long in the service—he was only fifteen ; and yet he had grown wholly indifferent to the fire of the enemy, though, a very short time before, the first volley of Minden made him " duck." He gives us an anecdote of the consideration of his Colonel, who wished to put him out of the range of a heavy cannonade : he was, how- ever, too reckless of danger to remove. At the battle of Felling- hausen, which took place soon after, he reckons the loss on both sides at 70,000 men : on which bloody affair he makes the just ob- servation, that in history and fame, battles are not valued either for their obstinacy or difficulty, but for their political consequences. At the end of the campaign, CALLANDER returned home; re- ceived a company; and would have been sent to garrison-duty, had he not been of too active a turn to remain idle. He exchanged ; and conducted to the scene of war a quantity of raw recruits, through a territory beset with the enemy. In this undertaking, he displayed a good deal of generalship; succeeded in joining the army; and fought in the battle of Graebenstein, and in other affairs. The pri- vations suffered by both armies, in these campaigns, appear to have been dreadful. The men were starved and diseased; the horses could scarcely move; and they all seem to have fought like men in a dream. On one occasion, CAMPBELL says—" The French did not stand as we had been accustomed to, see them ; and when they turned their backs upon us to fly, they found it impossible. Such was the miserable condition of themselves and their horses, that they tumbled down in the snow and the mud : and for us, I can say little more than that we tumbled a-top of them, and made a 'great many prisoners." "The inhabitants of the country," he -adds, "in which these operations were performed, must have been the greatest sufferers of all : but this is a subject on which it is 'not very agreeable to dilate." No; soldiers and historians too generally contrive to leave this feature out of the picture : the ruined hearths and violated persons of the poor people would cut a bad figure in descriptions of the royal game of war.

• In an affhir of outposts about this time, Captain FLETCHER was shot through the head : the ball entered at one temple and came out at the other: the only inconvenience this officer suffered from his wound was a difficulty in opening his jaws,—which, as he was a great eater, was a more serious consequence to him than it would have been to any other person. At the separate peace made by England, our troops were with- drawn, and Captain CALLANDER returned to England. Greedy of service, however, he sought employment in the Prussian army, and continued with it as a volunteer till the end of the war in 1763. Previous to this, he had purchased a majority : his father was un- able to assist him, but he had received offers of money from two separate sources : one of' the offers was creditable to both parties. The gallant Captain was one day taken aside by his tailor, JOHN KING, of Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, to whom lie owed a considerable bill : instead of a dun, the generous man produced the sum necessary for the purchase of his next step, and begged his customer to &himself with a majority. CALLANDER had, how- ever, previously accepted the offer of a sufficient loan from Sir LAWRENCE DUNDAS, the Commissary ; who afterwards, it seems, did not treat him so well as the tailor probably would have done.

Now that war is over, rambling begins. As soon as the peace was signed, Major CALLANDER started for Vienna, and thence - into Hungary, Italy, France, and Scotland; where he bethought himself his education had been omitted, and he began to supply the defect. He afterwards joined his regiment at Minorca; where he was fortunate enough to find General MOSTYN established as Governor. The garrison-duty of this island was not arduous : leaves of absence of considerable length were allowed: adventures of all kinds were engaged in; and when they fail in the author's Own person, he abounds in a store of military anecdotes of his friends, comrades, and commanders. He staid some time at Ge- neva, in the neighbourhood of VOLTAIRE, whom he repeatedly saw ; and he adds one more portrait of that celebrated man to the numbers already painted. On one occasion, the Major assumed a superiority over the Poet and Philosopher, for which perhaps few opportunities presented themselves. VOLTAIRE, at his own table, was carving a partridge, and stuck his own fork into the bird, which • he afterwards put into his mouth,—to ascertain, we suppose, whe- ther the fumetie was agreeable to his palate. Major CALLANDER was helped, and sent the plate away untouched. He was asked. why; and, with commendable candour, stated. the reason. VOL- TAIRE only observed, the English were a strange people, and had singular customs.

One of the accidents that happened to the Major about the same time was his marriage. This event, so important to other

men, does not appear ever to have been regarded by our author with becoming seriousness ; though he contracted it often enough to learn the whole weight and importance attached to it. The first of his four marriages was the result of the ennui of garrison-duty. The lady was a Miss FORBES, the daughter of the Paymaster of

the Forces at Minorca; " who, after the ordinary course of events in matters of this kind, made me happy in the possession of her hand." This is the Major's usual please; and he probably had some peculiar routine of courtship. He was a very fine-looking man, —at least he tells us the King said so ; and he probably had laid down some rules of approach, which he always adhered to; and he

appears to have found them generally successful in reducing the garrison. His second marriage was the result of a bet. He had

returned to England, and had got his rank of Lieutenant-Colonel

in the ordinary course of seniority. One evening at the Opera, in company with Colonel commonly called Count STAFFORD, a lady,

whom neither of them knew, made a considerable impression on

him. He offered STAFFORD a wager that in three (lays he would make her acquaintance. The Colonel does not favour us with the

successive steps of the affair; but thus summarily gives us to un-

- derstand that he was, as usual, victorious—" Suffice it to say, that I won my wager of Colonel STAFFORD'' and in ten days afterwards,

was married by special licence, at St. George's, Hanover Square,

to HENRIETTA DUTENS, the younger of the two ladies who had attracted our attention at the Opera." Miss DUTENS was the daughter of Mrs. DUTENS, the widow of the King's Jeweller.

She would have succeeded to considerable wealth at the death of her mother ; but she did not long survive the birth of her first

child. After the death of his second wife, Colonel CALLANDER

seems to have led the life of a " military man about town,"—now with his regiment in Ireland, now on leave in London, then again in Scotland on a tour. He was a member of the Pandemonium

Club, sacred to wits, along with JOHNSON, GOLDSMITH, and FOOTE : he seems also to have sometimes frequented Hells of an- other kind. He says he never played high, but he now and then won a 1,000/.•or two. In Ireland, he married a third time. Lady

ELIZABETH ANTRIM happened to sit next him one day atdinner; " and, after the ordinary course of events usual on these occa-

sions," she became his wife. Lord ANTRIM, his father-in-law, was a rough-spun Irishman, who used to call St. Athanasius " a damned old creed-making rascal." The Colonel sometimes speaks of his temper, and acknow- ledges that it was warm : it was probably reckoned hot by his

friends. At Dublin, he quarrelled with a gentleman at a ball, and killed him in the next room, among the refreshments. This event caused him to leave Ireland, and to exchange his regiment. He then appears to have wandered about on the Continent, till the French

Revolution ; at which time he was employed as Secretary of Lega- tion at Pm-is ; and was among the last Englishmen to quit the country. This happened about the time of his father's death ; when he returned to sit down for life as a country gentleman, at Craigfbrth, near Stirling. A responsibility, however, be had engaged in to his cousin, in behalf of his father, and an electioneering quarrel, ap- pear to have unsettled him. He had sold his Lieutenant-Colo- nelcy, but again determined upon entering the service. He joined the Duke of YORK before Lisle; pointed out how the town might be taken; was neglected, and disgusted. l Hs wife died in 1797 ; and he was thus more thoroughly unsettled than ever. It is at this period that a most active portion of his life commences. Vc rious circumstances induce him to enter into the service of tl e King of Naples; whose troops he disciplines, and whose coasts le surveys, and is saddled with the expense. He then receives a commission from NELSON and KEITH, for a propagandist exp, di- tion into the Ionian Islands. He brings them over; rules the whole country with a high hand ; puts Count CALOMARA death; and completely establishes the British authority. But' t the peace of Amiens, these Islands were given up, and the Colonel's occupation was gone. His active spirit then led him into Syria; and he traversed great part of Arabia. His return home was decided by hearing that his eldest son had married a lawyer's daughter, and that a condition had been discovered in the title-deeds which encouraged this hopeful gentleman to seize upon his absent father's property. It was many years, however, before the Colonel was permitted to come home and assert his rights. In the Medi- terranean, the vessel he was in was taken by a French corvette, and carried into Marseilles. In France, Colonel CALLANDER was de- tained under the rigorous system regarding prisoners kept up by NAPOLEON. He subsisted chiefly on the price of a fine Arabian which he had brought with him, and which he sold to the Emperor for 1,200 louis d'ors. When the money was done, the prisoner•en- deavoured to escape. He was seized. at Amsterdam, thrown into the common gaol, and lived in a damp dungeon for a long time. He was afterwards removed in a cart to Ham in Picardy; and shared all the hard usage at that time inflicted on an English pri- soner in France. He neglected to leave France during the Hun- dred Days, and was again caught on the return from Elba. He was in the prison of the Conciergerie after the battle of Waterloo, ignorant of the event, when he heard the bagpipes of a Scotch re- giment enter at the gates just by the prison-walls : the regiment was commanded by his son ! After his liberation, the work is taken up by the journal of his residence in various parts of the Continent, and the accounts of his family litigations ; and in the attempt of a woman that had been imposed upon him by the police of the Emperor, in the double capacity of spy and mistress, to establish a marriage in the Scotch Courts. This person, by whom he had a daughter, appears to have given him a great deal of trouble. The Colonel, however, consoled himst if by a fourth wife, as young as his first had been some fifty years before. She was the daughter of a French banker, M. DESCOT, who had rendered him ninny services during his de- tention. While in prison at Ham, Colonel CALLANDER became Sir JAMES CAMPBELL, and Mlle. DESCOT is the present Lady CAMPBELL.

These Memoirs abound in very curious anecdotes, and display a faithful picture of a strange and eventful life. It is not easy to gather a man's character from his own report; but we should think Sir JAMES CAMPBELL had been both a .brave and honour- able, though an impudent and hot-headed person. His talents are certainly far above the common run ; and he does not appear to have been naturally disposed to undervalue them. • Sir JAMES, under the name of Colonel CALLANDER, was the au- thor of a work called "Military Maxims," which had considerable• success.