scale which comfort or propriety would admit of. They all fall short of what are usually taken by the collectors of districts; and in comparison of what the commander-in-chief had with him the year before last, I have found people disposed to cry out against them as quite insufficient. Nor have I asked for a single soldier or trooper beyond what the commanding officers of districts have themselves offered as necessary and suitable. Yet, for myself and Dr. Smith, the united numbers amount to three elephants, above twenty camels, five horses, besides ponies for our principal servants, twenty-six servants, twentysix bearers of burdens, fifteen clashees to pitch and remove tents, elephant and camel drivers, I believe, thirteen; and since we have left the Company's territories, and entered Rajapootam, a guard of eighteen irregular horse, and forty-five sipahees on foot, including native officers. Nor is this all; for there is a number of petty tradesmen and other poor people, whose road is the same as ours, and who have asked permission to encamp near us, and travel under our protection; so that yesterday, when I found it expedient, on account of the scarcity which prevails in these provinces, to order an allowance of flour, by way of Sunday dinner, to every person in camp, the number of heads was returned one hundred and sixty-five. With all these formidable numbers, you must not, however, suppose that any exorbitant luxury reigns in my tent; our fare is, in fact, as homely as any two farmers in England sit down to; and, if it be sometimes exuberant, the fault must be laid on a country where we must take a whole sheep or kid, if we would have animal food at all, and where neither sheep nor kid will, when killed, remain eatable more than a day or two. The truth is, that where people carry everything with them, tent, bed, furniture, wine, beer, and crockery, for six months together, no small quantity of beasts of burden may well be supposed necessary; and in countries such as those which I have now been traversing, where every man is armed; where every third or fourth man, a few years since, was a thief by profession; and where, in spite of English influence and supremacy, the forests, mountains, and multitude of petty sovereignties, afford all possible scope for the practical application of Wordsworth's "good old rule," you may believe me, that it is neither pomp nor cowardice which has thus fenced your friend in with spears, shields, and bayonets.'* In the course of this arduous pilgrimage from Calcutta to Bombay, he found occasions for preaching upwards of fifty times; and the sermon delivered on one of those occasions, at the consecration of a church near Benares, was printed at the request of the Europeans who heard it; and, though bearing marks of having been written in haste, fully justifies their discernment in having made that request. The following passage has much of the peculiar manner of the author of Palestine :

'If the Israelites were endowed, beyond the nations of mankind, with wise and righteous laws, with a fertile and almost impregnable territory,

Letter dated Barrechar, (Guzerât,) March 14, 1825.

with a race of valiant and victorious kings, and a God who (while they kept his ways) was a wall of fire against their enemies round about them; if the kings of the wilderness did them homage, and the lionbanner of David and Solomon was reflected at once from the Mediterranean and the Euphrates-it was, that the way of the Lord might be made known by their means upon earth, and that the saving health of the Messiah might become conspicuous to all nations.

'My brethren, it has pleased the Almighty, that the nation to which we ourselves belong, is a great, a valiant, and an understanding nation; it has pleased Him to give us an empire, in which the sun never sets—a commerce by which the remotest nations of the earth are become our allies, our tributaries, I had almost said our neighbours; and by means (when regarded as human means, and distinct from his mysterious provi dence) so inadequate, as to excite our alarm as well as wonder, the sovereignty over these wide and populous heathen lands. But is it for our sakes that he has given us these good gifts, and wrought these great marvels in our favour? Are we not rather set up on high in the earth, that we may show forth the light by which we are guided, and be the honoured instruments of diffusing those blessings which we ourselves enjoy, through every land where our will is law, through every tribe where our wisdom is held in reverence, and in every distant isle which our winged vessels visit? If we value, then, (as who does not value?) our renown among mankind; if we exult (as who can help exulting?) in the privileges which the providence of God has conferred on the British nation; if we are thankful (and God forbid we should be otherwise) for the means of usefulness in our power; and if we love (as who does not love?) our native land, its greatness and prosperity, let us see that we, each of us in our station, are promoting to the best of our power, by example, by exertion, by liberality, by the prac tice of Christian justice and every virtue, the extension of God's truth among men, and the honour of that holy name whereby we are called. There have been realms before as famous as our own, and (in relation to the then extent and riches of the civilized world) as powerful and as wealthy, of which the traveller sees nothing now but ruins in the midst of a wilderness, or where the mariner only finds a rock for fishers to spread their nets. Nineveh once reigned over the East; but where is Nineveh now? Tyre had once the commerce of the world; but what is become of Tyre? But if the repentance of Nineveh had been per severed in, her towers would have stood to this day. Had the daughter of Tyre brought her gifts to the Temple of God, she would have continued a Queen for ever.'

This visitation gave the Bishop an opportunity of ascertaining the state and wants of the Christian congregations in the northern districts of his diocese, where in four principal places, Benares, Chunar, Merut, and Agra, he had the satisfaction of finding service performed, in Hindostanee, according to the Liturgy of the English Church; it also brought him acquainted with a race

of

of men of a character far more manly than the Bengalese, dwell→ ing, under native chiefs, among the mountains near Rajemahel, in the province of Bahar-not divided into castes, indifferent to the idolatries of the plains, and on every account offering, as the Bishop thought, a very promising field for Christian teachers. He accordingly (by way of beginning) fixed a missionary at Boglipore, a place affording local advantages for the establishment of schools, for learning the language, and becoming acquainted with the heads of these clans, who appear to be a primitive race, protected by their fastnesses from much contact or intercourse with the invaders that, from time to time, have made India their own. The Bishop entertained a very sanguine hope that a conversion of no ordinary extent would be thus effected, and regarded the beginning thus made as doubly important, on account of the connections which, in all probability, exist between these tribes and the Goands and other nations of central India, whom they are said strongly to resemble in habits and character.

In a letter to one of his friends, written at the close of this extensive journey, the Bishop distinctly expresses his satisfaction that he had never, in the whole course of it, turned either to the right hand or to the left for the sake of gratifying curiosity-that he had travelled in his episcopal capacity, and allowed no other objects to interfere with those which were pressed on him by the character of his functions. But no accomplished Englishman, far less a deeply read and deeply thinking scholar like Heber, could traverse these regions without having his attention called to many objects, which may not, at first sight, appear to have been, in his case, professional. The whole state and condition, however, of the Indian population, it was, in fact, most strictly and sacredly his duty to study; and how successfully he carried his talents to this object we have in our power to show, by some passages from his MS. correspondence. The letter, from which we are about to quote, was written in March, 1825;* and addressed to one of his oldest and most intimate friends, a gentleman, not of his own profession, but engaged in the business of the world, and the duties of a high public station.-We offer no apology for citing largely from such a letter, written upon such a subject, and are sure our readers will require none. It is not often that the English public are permitted to listen to such a witness as Bishop Heber, upon the concerns of their Indian fellow-subjects. Poet as he was by nature, it is nevertheless true, that a highly philosophical cast of mind is apparent in all his writings upon political subjects. He was equally enabled to work out the most serious speculations

This is the same letter from which we have already taken the description of Indian travelling.

of

of what may be termed Political Science, and at the same time to combine and compare those varieties of detailed facts, on which Political Science, if sound, will be found to depend.

"Though the greater part of the Company's provinces (except Kumaoon) are by no means abundant in objects of natural beauty or curiosity, the prospect offering little else than an uniform plain of slovenly cultivation, yet, in the character and manners of the people, there is much which may be studied with interest and amusement; and in the yet remaining specimen of oriental luxury and pomp at Lucknow ; in the decayed, but most striking and romantic, magnificence of Delhi; and in the Taj-Mahal of Agra, (doubtless one of the most beautiful buildings in the world,) there is almost enough, even of themselves, to make it worth a man's while to cross the Atlantic and Indian Oceans.

'Since then, I have been in countries of a wilder character, comparatively seldom trodden by Europeans, exempt during the greater part of their history from the Mussulman yoke, and retaining accordingly a great deal of the simplicity of early Hindoo manners, without much of that solemn and pompous uniformity which the conquests of the House of Timur seem to have impressed on all classes of their subjects. Yet here there is much which is interesting and curious. The people, who are admirably described (though I think in too favourable colours) by Malcolm, in his Central India, are certainly a lively, animated, and warlike race of men, though, chiefly from their wretched government, and partly from their still more wretched religion, there is hardly any vice, either of slaves or robbers, to which they do not seem addicted. Yet such a state of society is at least curious, and resembles more the picture of Abyssinia as given by Bruce, than that of any other country which I have seen or read of; while here too there are many wild and woody scenes, which, though they want the glorious glaciers and peaks of the Himmalaya, do not fall short in natural beauty of some of the loveliest glens which we went through ten years ago in North Wales; and some very remarkable ruins, which, though greatly inferior as works of art to the Mussulman remains in Hindoostân Proper, are yet more curious than them, as being more different from anything which an European is accustomed to see or read of.

One fact, indeed, during this journey has been impressed on my mind very forcibly-that the character and situation of the natives of these great countries are exceedingly little known, and in many instances grossly misrepresented, not only by the English public in general, but by a great proportion of those also who, though they have been in India, have taken their views of its population, manners, and productions from Calcutta, or at most from Bengal. I had always heard, and fully believed till I came to India, that it was a grievous crime, in the opinion of the Brahmins, to eat the flesh or shed the blood of any living creature whatever. I have now myself seen Brahmins of the highest caste cut off the heads of goats as a sacrifice to Doorga; and I know, from the testimony of Brahmins, as well as from other sources, that not only hecatombs of animals are often offered in this manner as

a most

a most meritorious act, (a Rajah, about twenty-five years back, offered sixty thousand in one fortnight,) but that any person, Brahmins not excepted, eats readily of the flesh of whatever has been offered up to one of their divinities; while among almost all the other castes, mutton, pork, fish, venison,-anything but beef and fowls,-are consumed as readily as in Europe. Again, I had heard all my life of the gentle and timid Hindoos, patient under injuries, servile to their superiors, &c. Now, this is doubtless, to a certain extent, true of the Bengalese, (who, by the way, are never reckoned among the nations of Hindoostân by those who speak the language of that country,) and there are a great many people in Calcutta who maintain, that all the natives of India are alike. But even in Bengal, gentle as the exterior manners of the people are, there are large districts close to Calcutta, where the work of carding, burning, ravishing, murder, and robbery, goes on as systematically, and in nearly the same manner, as in the worst part of Ireland; and on entering Hindoostân, properly so called, which, in the estimate of the natives, reaches from the Rajamahal hills to Agra, and from the mountains of Kumaoon to Bundelcund, I was struck and surprised to find a people equal in stature and strength to the average of European nations, despising rice and rice-eaters, feeding on wheat and barleybread, exhibiting in their appearance, conversation, and habits of life, a grave, a proud, and decidedly a martial character, accustomed universally to the use of arms and athletic exercises from their cradles, and preferring, very greatly, military service to any other means of livelihood. This part of their character, but in a ruder and wilder form, and debased by much alloy of treachery and violence, is conspicuous in the smaller and less good-looking inhabitants of Rajapootam and Malwah; while the mountains and woods, wherever they occur, show specimens of a race entirely different from all these, and in a state of society scarcely elevated above the savages of New Holland, or New Zealand; and the inhabitants, I am assured, of the Deccan, and of the Presidencies of Madras and Bombay, are as different from those which I have seen, and from each other, as the French and Portuguese from the Greeks, Germans, or Poles. So idle is it to ascribe uniformity of character to the inhabitants of a country so extensive, and subdivided by so many almost impassable tracts of mountain and jungle, and so little do the majority of those whom I have seen deserve the gentle and imbecile character often assigned to them.

'I met, not long since, with a speech by a leading member of the Scotch General Assembly, declaring his "conviction that the truths of Christianity could not be received by men in so rude a state as the East Indians, and that it was necessary to give them first a relish for the habits and comforts of civilized life before they could embrace the truths of the gospel." The same slang (for it is nothing more) I have seen repeated in divers pamphlets, and even heard it in conversations in Calcutta. Yet, though it is certainly true that the lower classes of Indians are miserably poor, and that there are many extensive districts where, both among low and high, the laws are very little obeyed, and

there