Lieut.-Colonel Cross, K.H., a distinguished Peninsular officer, died near London on the 27th of October. He served in the Peninsular war from 1808 until its close in 1814, and was at the battle of Waterloo, where he received a severe contusion.
Thomas Amyot, F.R.S., &c.—whose life, extended to the age of seventy-six, was passed in close intercourse with the literary and antiquarian circles of London, participating in their pursuits and aiding their exertions—died on the 28th of September. He was an active and respected member of almost every metropolitan association which had for its object the advancement of literature. He was a constant and valuable contributor to the Archæologia, the private secretary of Mr. Windham, the editor of Windham's speeches, and for many years treasurer to the Society of Antiquaries of London, and a director of the Camden Society. He was a native of Norwich, and obtained the friendship and patronage of Windham while actively engaged in canvassing in favor of an opponent of that gentleman for the representation of Norwich in the House of Commons. A Life of Windham was one of his long-promised and long-looked-for contributions to the biographies of English statesmen; but no such work has been published, and there is reason to believe that very little, if indeed any portion of it, was ever completed for publication. The journals of Mr. Windham were in the possession of Mr. Amyot; and if we may judge of the whole by the account of Johnson's conversation and last illness, printed by Croker in his edition of Boswell, we may assert that whenever they may be published they will constitute a work of real value in illustration of political events and private character,—a model in respect of fullness and yet succinctness, which future journalists may copy with advantage. Whatever Windham preserved of Johnson's conversation well merited preservation. Mr. Amyot's most valuable literary production is, his refutation of Mr. Tytler's supposition that Richard the Second was alive and in Scotland in the reign of Henry the Fourth.
Madame Branchu, so famous in the opera in the last century, is dead. The first distinct idea which many have entertained respecting the Grande Opera of Paris may have been derived from a note in Moore's Fudge Family in which the "shrill screams of Madame Branchu" were mentioned. She retired from the theater in 1826, after twenty-five years of prima donnaship—having succeeded to the scepter and crown of Mdlle. Maillard and Madame St. Huberty. She died at Passy, having almost entirely passed out of the memory of the present opera-going generation. She must have been a forcible and impassioned rather than an elegant or irreproachable vocalist—and will be best remembered perhaps as the original Julia in "La Vestale" of Spontini.
Major-General Wingrove, of the Royal Marines, died on the 7th October, aged seventy years. He entered the Royal Marines in 1793, served at the surrender of the Cape of Good Hope in 1795, the battle of Trafalgar, the taking of Genoa in 1814, was on board the Boyne when that ship singly engaged three French ships of the line and three frigates, off Toulon, in 1814, and on board the Hercules in a single action, off Cape Nichola Mole. In 1841 he was promoted to the rank of a major-general.