his gods; while the Mussulman leads a listless and sensual life, lolling on carpets, eternally smoking, and for the most part of the day locked up in his haram with his women: his days pass on in one unvaried round; there is no society, no public institutions, places of public resort or amusement; he, like the Hindoo, goes through with zeal and earnestness the formularies of his religion, and, like the Hindoo, he knows no one and cares for no one beyond the walls of his own barricadoed mansion. With such an example, and in such a state of society, it may be supposed in what an abject state the lower orders remain; they are but mere slaves to the higher ranks. In this state of degradation it is not to be wondered at that their cities present an uniform appearance of meanness, poverty, and ruin. There are but two objects at Aurungabad that deserve a specific notice-the gardens and the tomb, or mausoleum of Rabea Dooraney, reported to have been the favourite wife of the Emperor Aurungzebe. CHRISTIAN CONVERSION. It was partly the topic of conversation among a party of eight highly respectable Hindoos and Mussulmans I met by appointment in the gardenhouse of the venerable Shah Säfit; the mildness of whose manners, and the total absence of all bigotry in his conversation, rendered him not only a pleasing, but an instructive, friend. Upon my mentioning the wellknown name of Swartz, the company said that no real converts had ever been made; that those who had professed Christianity were men who had lost their caste for crime, or some abomination, and they were glad to become Christians; or that those who were in the very degraded ranks (the Sudra), having nothing to lose by the change, born polluted, and always avoided by the other ranks, would wish to assume another character, and that was always attainable by their becoming Christians; but, even with this wretched people, our success, dishonourable as the converts were, was very trifling; and many, finding that nothing was to be gained by the change, ATHENEUM VOL. 2. 2d series.. 31 and that the promises held out to them had not been fulfilled, had relapsed into their former state. "Why," exclaimed Murrane Sing (a Hindoo who was present, and who could read English)," do you not convert the Jews, who live among you, know your vir tues, and the excellence of your faith, and whose forefathers knew of the prophecies, and saw the wonders mentioned in your Vedas ?" I replied, that they were a stubborn race, and the denunciations against their race had been fulfilled; and I instanced the occasions and times. "This is the more in favour of my argument," replied Murrane; "for if, under the sufferings they have endured, and the accomplishment of the curses threatened them, they still remain obstinate and sinful, how are we to be convinced, much less converted, who know nothing of these signs and wonders of which you speak, and have neither had promises nor threats held out to us, except by mortals like ourselves, who may or may not intend well? at least, they have nothing to show us on the contrary but windy words." He then referred to Paul, who, he observed, undoubtedly was a prophet, and one whose mission appeared very probable, had made no effect on King Agrippa, who was as civilized as the Hindoos; yet he was not to be persuaded, even though one of the principal propagators of it was present before him: "then how," he added, "am I to be persuaded by those who are neither saints nor prophets ?" The conversation now reverted to Catholics (Catholas), and I was asked by one, possessing much information, why those persons who were British, but of that faith, did not adopt the Protestant creed? I replied, that they were Christians, though some difference existed in the forms of worship. Here my theological reasoning was again set at nought. The Hindoo replied, that the Catholics did not permit the read ing of the Bible, for reasons which he well knew; that they worshipped images, which our Scriptures forbid; that they had pilgrimages like the Hindoos, and holy water; but, what was more than all, they had in their history mortal men, who sinfully presumed to have performed miracles which belong. ed alone to the only God Bhagavan! Here he drew his sleeve over his mouth, and made three low reverences; and then exclaimed aloud, "Forgive me, forgive me, forgive me, for the crime of repeating His holy name! Now, sir," said he, " which is best we poor Hindoos, who have not been taught other things from on high; or your people, who have, but still disregard them ?" Of course I did not think it necessary to remind him of our Lady of Loretto, and the liquefactions of St. Januarius' blood; nor of our burnings in Smithfield; neither was I then informed of the miracles of Prince Hohenlohe, nor had I heard that the waters of the Jordan were held as sacred by M. Chateaubriand as the Hindoos hold those of the Ganges. At that time, too, the worthy matron, Joanna Southcote, was unknown. I had no inclination, either, to revert to the many gross superstitions prevalent in many parts of England; of the sale of children's cauls, &c.; nor had I the impudence to tell him, that I could tell his character and disposition by examining his skull! Indeed, it was unnecessary to remind him of our superstitions and absurdities; for he slily enjoined, "Now, my young friend, you, who are Protestants -why do you not perform your worship duly and zealously? The nearest temple you have is at Bombay. Your European soldiers have no spiritual instructor. No, sir! I speak it in humility, you care little about your own religion; come to India with a box of clothes, take home a box full of money, and think you do a very meritorious act in subscribing a few rupees to convert us, and bring us to salvation, though apparently regardless of your own. "This," he continued, "is very pious and very generous; but, believe me, before we give up the faith of our forefathers, a religion much older than yours, we must see you fulfil the doctrines it inculcates, and observe its ordinances; neither must you wonder if we require signs and wonders to convince us. But who The generality of missionaries sent to India have not the smallest chance of success with the learned natives of India. With the Bible in his hand, and abundance of zeal, the missionary stalks forth into fields and villages, expecting that his well-meaning exhortations, and the pious examples he sets, is to convert the heathen. Nothing can be more fallacious. They are great idlers, and would, for the sake of gossiping, of which they are immoderately fond, run after, visit, and listen to a missionary; but as to what they have heard, or what they may have received, it has as much effect upon their mind as the passing breeze. They are, as before observed, polite and decorous in their behaviour to strangers; they will make professions, for they are adepts at dissimulation, and perfect at flattery. I have seen a Hindoo most devoutly listen to a discourse, beg a tract, and, on his return to the village, leave it on the threshold of the door of the temple, and fall down with his forehead on the floor, and worship the image of that ugly fellow Ganesa! On my expostulating once on this impropriety with a convert, he replied, "My father did the same, and he was more prosperous than I am. The hopes and promises held out to me by the Padree (clergy man) have not been fulfilled; and one of your Burra Sahibs (great men) has lately broken a commandment (alluding to a crim. con. just taken place, happily an event of rare occurrence in India); so, why may not I? Besides which," he added, "Ganesa is offended with me; and I will both pray to Ganesa, and listen to the Padree!" I should consider myself guilty of great dissimulation and dishonour, did I not repeat with fidelity the ideas of the superior orders of the natives; for, till those persons are perfectly and radically converted, there is as little pro bability or possibility of the inferior orders following, as there is of the disciples of St. Peter at Rome giving up the Roman Catholic faith. Far easier would be the task of converting the multitude in England to any particular faith than the Hindoos. No people in the world have such deep-rooted and inveterate prejudices as them; and never were a people, whose conversion was attempted, ever attacked with weaker weapons, or more unfit assailants, than those employed at the pre sent day. VARIETIES. Original Anecdotes, Literary News, Chit Chat, Incidents, &c. Maxims of Sir Morgan ODoherty. EPITAPHS. and We moderns are perhaps inferior to our ancestors in nothing more than in our epitaphs. The rules, nevertheless, for making a good epitaph, are exceedingly simple. You should study a concise, brief, and piquant diction; you should state distinctly the most remarkable points in the character and history of the defunct, avoiding, of course, the error into which Pope so often fell, of omitting the name of the individual in your verses, leaving it to be tagged to the tail or beginning of the piece, with a separate and prosaic "hic jacet." Thirdly, there should be, if possible, some im provement of the subject-some moral or religious or patriotic maxim,— which the passenger carries with him, and forgets not. I venture to present, as a happy specimen, the following, which is taken from a tomb-stone in Winchester church-yard, and which tradition ascribes to a late venerable prelate of that see, Dr. Hoadley : "Private John Thoms lies buried here, "Who died of drinking cold small beer:Good Christian! drink no beer at all, Or, if you will drink beer, don't drink it small." Nothing can exceed the nervous pith and fine tone of this, both in the narrative and the didactic parts. It is really a gem, and confers honour on the Bishop-on whom, by the way, a clever enough little epitaph was written shortly after his death by a brother Whig and D. D. Bishop Hoadley was, in this doctor's opinion, an heretical scribe, and his monument encroached too much on one of the great pillars of the Cathedral. "Here lying Hoadley lies, whose book ROASTING. Of late they have got into a trick of serving up a roasted pig without his usual concomitants. I hate the inno A. vating spirit of this age; it is my aversion, and will undo the country. ways let him appear erect on his four legs, with a lemon in his mouth, a sprig of parsley in his ear, his trotters bedded on a lair of sage. One likes to see a pig board of a Swift, a Pope, an Arbuthappear just as he used to do upon the not. Take away the customs of a people, and their identity is destroyed. 66 TRUTH LIES AT THE SURFACE." There is not a truer saying in this world, than that truth lies on the surface of things. The adage about its lying in a well was invented by some solemn old ass, some passy measures pagan," as Sir Toby Belch calls him, who was ambitious of being thought deep, while, in point of fact, he was only muddy. Nothing that is worth having or knowing, is recondite or difficult to be discovered. Go into a ballroom, and your eye will in three seconds light (and fix) on the beauty. Ask the stupidest host in the world to bring you the best thing he has in his house, and he will, without doubt, set a bottle of claret forthwith on your table. Ask the most perfect goose of a bookseller who is the first poet in the world, and he will name Shakspeare. I have never been able to understand the advantage of hard study, deep researches, learned investigations, &c. &c. Is there any really good author lying concealed anywhere among the litter of lumber ransacked only by the fingers of the Bibliomaniacs? Is there anything equal to punch, with which the drinking public in general remains unacquainted? I think not. I therefore take things easy. DRAM-DRINKING. There are two kinds of drinking which I disapprove of I mean dramdrinking, and port-drinking. I talk of the drinking of these things in great quantities, and habitually. I have many reasons that I could render for the disgust that is in me, but I shall be contented with one. These potables taken in this way, fatally injure a man's personal appearance. The drinker of drams becomes either a pale, shivering, blue-and-yellow-looking, lank-chopped, miserable, skinny animal, or his eyes and cheeks are stained with a dry, fiery, dusky red, than which few things can be more disgusting to any woman of real sensibility, and true feminine delicacy of character. The port drinkers, on the other hand, get blowsy about the chops, have trumpets of noses, covered with carbuncles, and acquire a muddy look about the eyes. As for dram-drinking, I thing nobody ought to indulge in it except a man under sentence of death, who wishes to make the very most of his time, and who knows that, let him live never so quietly, his complexion will inevitably be quite spoilt in the course of the week.-Blackwood. In helping a lady to wine, always fill the glass to the very brim; for custom prevents them from taking many glasses at a time; and I have seen cross looks when the rule has been neglected by young and inexperienced dandies.-Ib. FASHION. The King,if Sir Thomas Lawrence's last and best picture of him may be believed, wears, when dressed for dinner, a very short blue surtout, trimmed with a little fur, and embroidered in black silk upon the breast, and all about the button holes, &c.-black breeches and stockings, and a black stock. I wish to call general attention to this, in the hopes of seeing his Majesty's example speedily and extensively adopted. The modern coat is the part of our usual dress, which has always given most disgust to the eye of people of taste; and I am, therefore, exceedingly happy to think, that there is now a probability of its being entirely exploded. The white neckcloth is another abomination, and it also must be dismissed. A blue surtout, and blue trowsers richly embroidered down the seams, form the handomest dress which any man can wear within the limits of European costume. SMOKING. Mediocrity is always disgusting, except, perhaps, mediocrity of stature in a woman. Give me the Paradise Lost, the Faerie Queen, the Vanity of Human Wishes, that I may feel myself elevated and ennobled; give me Endymion, or the Flood of Thessaly, or Pye's Alfred, that I may be tickled and amused. But on no account give me an eminently respectable poem of the Beattie or Campbell class, for that merely sets one to sleep. In like fashion, give me, if you wish to make me feel in the heaven of heavens, a hookat. There is no question that this is the Paradise Gained of the smoker.-But, if you cannot give me that, give me a segar: with which whoso is not contented deserves to inhale sixteen pipes of assafoetida per diem in secula seculorum. What I set my face against is the vile mediocrity of a pipe, properly so called. No pipe is cleanly but the common Dutch clay, and that is a great recommendation, I admit: but there is something so hideously absurd in the appearance of a man with a clay pipe in his mouth, that I rather wonder anybody can have courage to present himself in such a position. The whole tribe of meerschaums, &c. are filthiness itself. These get saturated with the odious oil of the plant, and are, in fact, poisonous. The only way in which you can have a pipe at once gay-looking and cleanly, is to have a glass tube within it, which can be washed with water immediately after use; but then the glass gets infernally hot. On the whole, unless you be a grandee, and can afford to have a servant expressly devoted to the management of your smoking concerns, in which case a hookah is due to yourself, the best way is to have nothing but segars. Blackw. SEGARS. The Havana segar is unquestiona bly at the head. You know it by the peculiar beauty of the firm, brown, smooth, delicately-textured, and soft leaf, and, if you have anything of a nose, you can never be deceived as to its odour, for it is a perfect bouquet. The Chinese cheroots are the next in order; but the devil of it is, that one can seldom get them, and then they are almost always dry beyond redemption. The best Chinese cheroots have a delicate greyish tinge; and, if they are not complete sticks, put them into an air-tight vessel with a few slices of good juicy melon, and, in the course of a few hours, they will extract some humidity from their neighbours. Some people use a sliced apple, others a carrot, either of which may do when a melon is not to be had, but that is the real article, when attainable. As to all the plans of moistening segars by means of tea-leaves, rum-grog, &c. they are utterly absurd, and no true smoker ever thinks of them. Manilla segars occupy the third station in my esteem, but their enormous size render them inconvenient. One hates being seen sucking away at a thing like a walking-cane. No real smoker uses any of these little knick-knackeries they sell under the name of segar-tubes, and the like of that. The chief merit of the thing is the extreme gentleness and delicacy with which the smoke is drawn out of the leaf by the loving and animated contact, and eternally varying play and pressure of that most wonderful piece Italian proverb. This is one instance, among many in Italian history, of the great influ ence of proverbs in the affairs of that people. The two families of the Amadei and the Uberti, from a dread of the consequences, long suspended the revenge they meditated on the younger Buondelmonte, for the affront he had put upon them in breaking off his match with a young lady of their family, and marrying another. At length Moscha Lamberti, suddenly rising, exclaimed, in two proverbs, that Those who considered every thing would never conclude on any thing!' closing with the proverbial saying-Cosa fatta capo ha! " deed done has an end !" This sealed the fatal determination, and was long held in fatal remembrance by the Tuscans, as the cause and beginning of the bloody factions of the Guelphs and the Ghibbellins. Dante has immortalized the energetic expression in a scene of the Inferno: Then one Maim'd of each hand, uplifted in the gloom 'The deed once done, there is an end'—that prov❜d A seed of sorrow to the Tuscan's race." Milton, too, adopted this celebrated Italian proverb; when deeply engag ed in writing "The Defence of the People," and warned that it might terminate in his blindness, he resolutely concluded his work, exclaiming, although the fatal prognostication had been accomplished, Cosa fatta capo ha! JUST AS IT FALLS, QUOTH THE WOOER TO THE MAID.- -Scotch. Kelly gives a ludicrous account of the origin of this saying. A courtier went to woo a maid; she was dressing supper with drop at her nose; she a |