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they did this, will have put an additional security on their allegiance for the next trial, as, doubtless, their firm adherence to their foreign masters in the present instance was fortified by their recollection of past victories gained under the same command.

SUPERIORITY OF THE SEPOYS OVER THE NATIVE TROOPS.

The prodigious disparity, in point of military efficiency, between these troops and the very same kind of men in the service of the native powers, is by our author attributed chiefly to discipline, and a perfect army mechanism on the one side, and incurable irregularity, disarray, and defective manual exercise on the other. In this Mahratta war a great deal of valour was evinced by portions of the native armies, especially those composed of Arabs; but it was all in vain.

"It is discipline, together with a quick firing of the flint-lock and field-pieces, which has given us the striking superiority over the natives. It is the steady fire of these that the troops of the native princes cannot face: that regularity of movement, quickness of evolution, and strict and unerring obedience in action, giving union and combination, opposed by confusion, clamour, distraction, and insubordination, must ever secure a commanding ascendancy. The natives have no idea of the value of time in military operations; the most frivolous excuses or causes preventing the movements of their armies; which will always make an active and regular force superior to them. They express their astonishment and the utmost dread at the steady and continued fire of our Sepoys, which they liken to a wall vomiting forth fire and flames. The firm and regular pace, the first and most necessary part of a soldier's instructions, is quite incomprehensible to them; and in this we again see the almost total change requisite to complete a soldier, as he is not allowed even to use his legs but in a prescribed manner."

PROGRESS OF THE EUROPEAN MILITARY SYSTEM IN INDIA.

In tracing the progress of the European military system in India, as the instrument of the progess of our dominion there, the Colonel thus marks the contrast between the situation of the English as at the period just preceding their beginning to form the natives into regular soldiers, and as in 1817.

"It is curious to take a retrospective view of an English factor at his desk in 1746, with a pen behind his ear, trembling at the nod of the meanest of the Mogul's officers, and treated with the

greatest insolence and oppression; with no higher military character under his direction than a peon stationed near a bale of goods; with a jurisdiction not extending beyond a court-yard of a warehouse connected with it; and contrast this picture with the situation of the Company's army in 1817, when 150,000 men, disciplined by British officers, presented the spectacle of as fine an army as any in the world, receiving its impetus of action from a great statesman and general, who held the person of the Mogul as a pensioner on the bounty of his government, wielding the political and military resources of the empire over a theatre of operations in the present campaign, extending from Loudheanah to Guzaraut, in a segment of a circle of nearly 1200 miles. Such are the minimum and maximum of our Eastern empire."

INDIAN SUPERSTITIONS NOT INSUPERABLE.

It seems it is not purely and exclusively a military alteration that the native troops in the English service have undergone. In contempt of all the Anglo-Indian oracles that have pronounced the thing impossible, we have the Colonel here deposing that their punctiliousness in matters of superstition has considerably worn away. The numerous assertors that everything of this kind was to be eternal, omitted to say,

"What time next week eternity should end."

Our author specifies various facts in evidence of this modification of their superstitious feelings. For instance : "There is not at this day a man of the highest caste, who will not be grateful for European medical assistance, if the medicine be taken from his own vessel, and given him from the hand of one of his own caste; a compliance which would formerly have been considered as the highest pollution." The native costume, which is not independent of the ordinances of their superstition, has been in a great measure relinquished for the European military dress. The horror of leather, lest it should be the skin of a cow, has given place to the use of boots, saddlery, and, in the Bengal cavalry, of leather breeches. It is an act of impurity "to touch the feathers of our domestic fowl ; " yet in one of the battalions many of the Brahmins, with the rest of the soldiers, wear them with pride, as having been conferred as a mark of honour for their military conduct. In the Bengal presidency

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there is no difficulty in getting rid of the mark of caste on the face, which is not permitted on parade.

"The very touch of a dead body, or anything deprived of life, would be to a Brahmin the greatest stain of impurity which could befall him. But in more than one instance, the native officers and soldiers, many of whom were Brahmins, have insisted, from a sense of gratitude, on carrying an European officer to his grave. The lips of an European defile, beyond recovery, a vessel out of which he may drink; but the Brahmins in action have allowed their European officers, and even requested them, to drink in this manner from their vessels."

INDIAN CASTES MERGED IN MILITARY DUTIES.

The sepoys in the French service, about sixty years since, were attempted to be compelled, by M. Lally, to work in the trenches, and carry such burdens as belong to the koolies. If they could not have escaped from such dishonour to the dignity and sanctity of caste, by desertion, many of them would probably have rather suffered death. But says our author,

"So great a change has taken place by allowing time and forbearance to work their own way in the British service, that the highest caste man looks upon it to be as much his duty, and will fill a gabion with as much readiness as a grenadier in a king's regiment."

It is pleasing to hear of such instances of accommodation and forbearance on the part of the English soldiers as the following:

"The 76th regiment served under Lord Lake for so long a period with the Sepoys, that they had become attached to each other; and the former being aware of the prejudices of the latter, have been known, when they happened to arrive the first in camp, to wait till Jack Sepoy (as they call him) had drawn the water from the tank or well."

THE QUESTION OF TOLERATION OR CONVERSION IN INDIA. If, instead of being a matter of perfect indifference, it were ever so desirable, that Christianity might prevail in place of what are now the religions of India, this substitution could not be effected or attempted, according to the Colonel's account, but at the hazard of our empire there.

"I do not see," he says, "any cause which at present exists in India, froin the Mahometans, or Hindoos, or any native power,

to shake our government over this part of the world, that is to say, if we respect the prejudices of the natives, do not attempt to subvert their religion by the introduction of our own, and if our military force is kept up, &c., &c., &c.”

An "attempt" by violence is not here meant ; it would have been pure impertinence to make the grave supposition of a thing which no one proposes or meditates; the danger here threatened must be from an endeavour to illuminate, convince, and persuade. And it is with exquisite propriety that this is threatened by a writer who has been telling us, in a statement of facts, how these most tenacious pagans may, by mild and patient management, be beguiled out of one prejudice after another, and all the while become the better pleased with those who are thus pilfering away particles and pieces of their religion; and a writer who might know that within the last twenty years, there have been at the least ten thousand addresses of argument, expostulation, and censure, made to assemblages of these people, in innumerable diversities of circumstance and scene, without ever once exciting any such commotion or violence as would in many parts of England infallibly attend any similar attempt at the instruction and reproof of the populace.

But in the last place, whether the attempt at supplanting their religions by our own would be too hazardous, or not, the success, we are told, is impossible. And we have here, for the five hundredth time, the whole veteran story of no Brahmin having ever turned Christian; of its being only some of the miserable outcasts that suffer themselves to be "dubbed Christians," for the sake of getting crammed with rice, &c., &c. We confess we have rather wondered at all this being at this time said or sung by a lieutenant-colonel. A time there was, indeed, when all this was the approved speech and song in very high places, in councils and senates, among statesmen, governors, and officers of elevated rank. But it has followed the customary laws and progress of the fashions, which, in growing obsolete in the uppermost rank, become in vogue in the next, and so downward in rapid succession; and vanishing from the west end of the town, and ultimately from the metropolis, circulate away through the provinces toward their last show and their extinction in the hamlets of the fisherman. As to this

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strain of talk, so considerable a time, according to fashion's account of duration, has elapsed since it was the vogue or the rage among the most imposing class, that we really thought it had probably descended by this time somewhat below the rank of our author.

With respect to the benefits conferred on the people of India by the British dominion, independently of any attempts to impart Christianity, its effects may in some views deserve all that warmth of eulogy which he lavishes indiscriminately on the whole of its operations and influence.

LINCOLN CATHEDRAL.

WORKS in which authorship is quite secondary and supplemental to art, can hardly be considered as coming within the scope and design of literary criticism. But we are unwilling to let pass without a sentence or two of notice, a performance of such surpassing excellence in its department, as this of Mr. Wild. It has been a good while waited for by, the lovers of art and antiquity, with an expectation, founded upon the known talents of Mr. Wild as a draughtsman, and the high excellence of the engravers, of a work approaching extremely near to absolute perfection; and we think they will be at once compelled and gratified to acknowledge, that they had not been able to form an idea of excellence in representation, from which they will feel any falling off. when they come to look at these delineations.

POWER OF SIZE ON THE IMAGINATION.

They are on a large scale, which is greatly advantageous to the full development of the complicated and varied composition of the forms and parts of this magnificent structure, It is quite evident that something is gained for intelligibleness, and much for impression, by this ample form of exhibition. It is independent of our will, and of any possible mental effort, that we receive from a large picture or print of a grand edifice, an impression more approaching to that made by the reality, than from a small one. This is especially the case with persons but slenderly acquainted

An Illustration of the Architecture and Sculpture of the Cathedral Church of Lincoln. By Charles Wild. 4to. 1819.