last, and altered for the worse."-" But surely you must have more pleasure in the society of our good friend the Lieutenant since he has begun to interest himself on literary subjects; his conversation must be far more rational than when it was confined to pigs and turnips."— "More rational, Madam!" I exclaimed; "I wish you could have heard him talk to me this morning about the probability that some of the Egyptian sculpture at Thebes was in honour of Epaminondas whose native city it was, or assure me that there was now no doubt that the man in the Iron Mask' was Lord George Sackville, and it served him right for his behaviour at the battle of Blenheim." The only good my conversation with Mrs. Preston produced, was her acquiescence in my proposal, that each member of the society should order a book in turn. Hoping that no one would voluntarily select a work which he had no chance of comprehending, I flattered myself that this regulation would be of some benefit; but alas! my remedy came too late. Pride and folly had obtained too strong an influence, no one would condescend to order a trifling publication; and when my poor little host proposed "Higgins on the Celtic Druids," and another member, "Faber on Expiatory Sacrifices," I gave the matter up in despair, and determined to let them go mad in their own way. Mrs. Brown, indeed, appeared to be a little more reasonable; with a most self-complacent air she ordered an "Essay on Packing;" she had seen it advertised in an old "Quarterly Review," and she should make her girls read it very attentively; for the last time Sophy went from home she quite spoiled one of her best gowns by packing it so ill. All the gentlemen members objected to this book, as it could not be generally interesting, and they should be sorry if they could not put their clothes into a portmanteau without rules; the dispute quickly became violent, and it was with difficulty that I could appease the tumult by my assurances that it was a law-book, and did not contain one word about trunks or bandboxes. Mrs. Brown looked very incredulous and angry, and has not sent me her usual present of orange marmalade. She objected to every book subsequently proposed by other members, and especially to "Vindicia Ecclesiæ Anglicana," because the title was French, she having particularly strong anti-gallican prejudices. When informed that the words were Latin, her opposition was withdrawn, as we had never been at war with the Latins in her memory. This afforded her daughter Sophy a fair opportunity of displaying the knowledge she had acquired under Mrs. Preston's auspices; and she assured her mother that there never had been such a people as the Latins; that Latin was the ancient language of Rome, but had not been spoken there for these two thousand

years.

Tired by my visit, I left S as soon as I could, on very indifferent terms with my old friend; in open enmity with Mrs. Preston; out of favour with nearly all my former acquaintance, and in that exasperated state of temper against Book-societies which I have sought to relieve by pouring out my complaints as a lesson and a warning to the world in general. W. E.

SOCIETY IN INDIA.-NO. I.

Ir is quite provoking to remark, how ignorant every body is about India, notwithstanding its vast importance, and its gigantic growth, as a member of the British empire. Many country gentlemen, perhaps, would not have found out to this day, that such a country existed, had they not heard of it as being a convenient lumber-room for stowing away supernumerary children; and I really believe it to be chiefly owing to the overgrown brats too big for school, and too unmanageable for home, and staring us in the face with the perplexing question, what is to be done with them? that Hindostan occupies any space at all in the public eye. Yet, in spite of the East India Company's being so admirable a dry-nurse for our boys, and of the continued intercourse consequently going on between the countries, a most lamentable ignorance of the modes of life peculiar to the European inhabitants, and still more, of the habits and character of the natives of India, prevails and is still likely to prevail amongst us.

Just after my arrival from that part of the world, I happened to pass a few days with a friend, who kindly taking it for granted, that I could converse upon no other subject, and equally willing to show how well he understood Indian affairs himself, began, to the great admiration of his wife and two daughters, and to convince them that his knowledge was unbounded, to talk to me very glibly about our English manner of living in the East. "Well," said he, "you Englishmen -lead a very easy life of it there. True, you pretend to devote an hour or two in the morning to business; but is it not all done to your hand by your black writers, of whom every Englishman has one, if not two in his pay, at twenty rupees a month? The rest of your time you expend about improving your persons, or in your recreations. [I did not rightly comprehend what my friend meant, when he talked about our spending so much time in improving our persons, although in our ablutions, as in the other duties of the toilette, we Anglo-Indians are religiously exact.] Then as to your merchants, what a happy time they have of it, compared to us poor devils in the city! For they never look at their accounts themselves; they keep no books, but every thing of that sort is done for them by their banyans, who conduct all their mercantile operations; so that they have nothing to do, but to eat, drink, sleep, and grow rich. Then what a number of servants! Moor-men and peons to run before your palanquins, and to carry umbrellas over your heads when you take your walks [taking walks is by no means a favourite amusement in India];-a porter, who has nothing to do but to answer raps at your door [we have no knockers, nor are our doors closed, unless the house is uninhabited]. You have hairy maids [here my friend was still more unintelligible]—you have hairy maids," he continued, "to brush away your dirt, and besides all these, a vast number of slaves, male and female." [This puzzled me not a little, for there are no slaves in British India.] For some minutes I felt impatient to set my friend right, and to divest him of the shreds and patches of nonsense he had picked up about a country he had never seen; when to my great relief, after a short pause on my part, which he interpreted into acquiescence in what he had been saying, the

conversation took another turn. The next day, on looking over some books on my friend's table, I perceived a volume of the New Cyclopædia by Dr. Rees, which, from a paper of reference he had stuck in it, he had, it seems, been recently consulting. It was at the article "East Indies," that he had placed it; and I found that the Cyclopædia was the oracle to which he was in the habit of applying, that he might be enabled to converse with his guests upon what he called their own subjects. I thus discovered the rich mine from which he had derived the Oriental information that had puzzled me so much the preceding evening. But I was more surprised on finding the article" Astronomy," in the same work, considerably thumbed, and even doubled down. The problem was solved afterwards, for his wife told me, that the Professor of Astronomy from Cambridge had been paying them a visit, and that Mr. had surprised the Doctor as much by talking about the stars, as he had myself by talking about India. It was the following passage that had furnished him with his Indian disquisition, though, it must be confessed, my friend's inferences had taken considerable strides beyond the strict text of his authority.

"Europeans lead in India a very easy life. The men who are in the service of the East India Company, devote a small part of the morning to business, and persons of fortune keep in their pay a black writer, at the rate of twenty rupees per month. They spend the rest of their time in personal improvement or recreation. Europeans have besides, one or two banyans, who note down payments and receipts, and adjust all pecuniary matters in buying and selling. Moor-men and peons run before the palanquin, and carry an umbrella over their master, when he walks; every house has a porter to answer the door, and a harra maid to clear away the dirt; and a great number of slaves, both male and female."-To say the truth, I never had much respect for Cyclopædias, or for Cyclopædists; but my dislike to these distributors of ready-made knowledge, and their short cuts to universal science, now rose to absolute disgust.

Nor is my worthy friend's case a singular one. Others are in the habit of swallowing the most absurd crudities for genuine information upon the subject of India. Our eminent northern novellist, potent master though he be of all the aids and instruments pertaining to his art, has strangely committed himself, when he sent out, for want of knowing what better to do with them, his two personages of the Canongate Chronicles to that country. What strange havock does he make with names, employments, and usages, confounding Hindoo with Mussulman, Mussulman with Hindoo! Fiction, to be sure, is a mighty privileged sort of person; but is she to be absolved from all probability of time, and place, and the verisimilitudes of local manners and practices? What Anglo-Indian could read without a stare of the wildest astonishment, of Hargrave's journey to Seringa patam, to obtain an audience of that very accommodating person, Hyder Ali Sahib ? It was indeed very provident in Sir Walter Scott to send the poor fellow to a comfortable inn, when he got there, or as the author calls it, a khan, to which Hargrave returns every night, when the business of the day is concluded. But unluckily there are no inns* or khans (the Per

* There are choultries in Mysore and other parts of India, but these are for the March.-VOL. XXII. NO. LXXXVII Q

sian word for the same thing) in any part of Hyder's dominions: and we might as well have been told by what sign it was known,-the Bear or the White Lion; for the author evidently intended to tell his readers that his hero was at a comfortable place of accommodation, whilst he was transacting his business at Seringapatam. A Feringhi walking backwards and forwards to his khan in a fort, where no Feringhi could have showed his nose without instant danger of his head; and this too in the fury of the hottest warfare ever waged by the Company against a native power of Hindostan !

Now, although India has been often described, and is perpetually talked about by those who have never seen it, a residence there of some years is not, I presume, a positive disqualification for describing it; and on the faith of that presumption, I have ventured on some notices of the European modes of society in that interesting country. The sketches were taken a few years ago, but English society in that country remains long unaltered. Nowhere can you find an ampler harvest of original character than in Indian society; of character modified and coloured by various causes, that are not to be seen at work elsewhereclimate, indulgences incident to climate, provincial habitudes, distance from home; not one of which but has had its share in getting up that strange complex being, that bundle of whims and oddities, whom upon his arrival in England we 'clepe an "old Indian." For old Indians, plant them where you will, are a distinct race; on Choultry-plain, or at the Oriental Club; in Choringa, or Portman-square; in the language of Tacitus, 66 propriam ac synceram, et tantum sui similem gentem." Of the natives, little will be ever known, though much will continue to be said or written about them: for they have two characters; exoteric in their intercourses with us, esoteric in their relations to each other. In their social and domestic aspect, they shrink from all inquisition, and an impenetrable curtain veils them from speculative curiosity. But in the course of a pretty long experience in native litigation, more perhaps of their interior character has been incidentally revealed to me, than to those who from the moment of their arriving in India, to the hour of their departure, have been thrown into no nearer contact with them than results from the mere relation of masters and servants, and who have been too much engrossed in the cares of accumulation, or in the luxuries and amusements of the country, to study the most intricate and difficult page of our common nature. Nor will my notes be found, perhaps, quite uninteresting to those who, following juridical pursuits at home, may wish to know something of our provincial jurisprudence, and to have a few slight sketches of a legal life in that remote part of our empire.

I was three or four years at the English bar, before the project of trying my luck in the East dawned upon my mind. Had the law been propitious to my vows at home, the smallest prize that Westminsterhall yielded, would have secured me as her votary at her own favoured altar. But having trudged down there so many cold and foggy mornings without a fee to cheer me, (unless now and then a stray half-guinea destined to some other barrister, who happened not

reception merely, not the entertainment of travellers, affording only a roof to shelter them.

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to be in chambers, wandered to my fingers), my patience began to give way; my prospects of the chancellorship became daily more dim ;-and at last, hope itself had been so long deferred, that it had even ceased to make my heart sick. To add also to the discouragements of my professional career, I had, by ill-luck, selected the Norfolk circuit, a sort of hospital for decayed judges, and proverbially unproductive of fees. We were sure, as often as the judges met to choose their circuits, to have old Mr. Baron Perryn, then in the fifteenth year of his expecting his pension, and at the extreme verge of a life, which, even in youth, had been intellectually decrepid. When he sat at Nisi Prius, if a point arose in the cause, he would sit still while it was argued by the two opposite leaders, Mr. Sergeant Le Blanc, and Mr. George Wilson-and then say, "My brother Le Blanc is an excellent lawyer and an honourable man, and so is Mr. Wilson: What then am I to do?" This appeal to the honour of two of the most honourable men in the profession, had its effect. It put an end to all farther wrangling, and it was mutually agreed, that he who was conscious of being wrong should give way. Thus the point was sure of being rightly ruled. With Perryn, Mr. Justice Ashurst was frequently joined on the Norfolk circuit. He had been an eminent practitioner in his day, and one of the best authorities in Westminster Hall; but his faculties had been worn by labour, and were yielding to the encroachments of Perryn, good soul, had no faculties that time or infirmity could injure. age. Yet he was quite unconscious of his inefficiency; and I never shall forget his remarking in the tremulous treble of seventy-five, "It is high time that my brother Ashurst should retire."

The Bar has the credit of being a gentlemanly profession, because it is presumed that they have the education of gentlemen. This is not the case invariably. Many of them have scarcely seen any other school than an attorney's desk, and arrive at the bar with minds whose widest horizon is bounded by the office in which they drudged. I say nothing of the mediocrity of their talents, to which the few, who from time to time blaze in our legal firmament, are only exceptions. But for spite, envy, and uncharitableness, there is nothing like the English Bar. Actors and actresses, goaded by the jealousies of the green-room, are not more petulant, more intolerant of each other's merit, more arrogant of their own. the circuit, it is treason. It could only have been obtained by hugging If a young man get a brief on an attorney (that is, by courting and paying attentions to one), and these illiberal insinuations are encouraged by persons the most notorious for the lowest condescensions to that part of the profession. On the Norfolk circuit, the business was in few hands. The junior briefs were caught up by Sellon and Best, (the latter called Second Best, to distinguish him from the able individual now at the head of the Common Pleas) whose clerks always hunted in couples, and were hawks admirably trained for pouncing on attorneys.

My little patrimony was now fast declining, and evinced sundry intelligible symptoms of it. My best black coat began to assume a dingy hue, and instead of regaling myself at the Grecian or George's, I was

They have now

This was before the passing of the Judges' Pension Act. no inducement to remain on the bench after the loss of their faculties.