a manner as to render the stream available for purposes of navigation and irrigation, to an extent which will have a most important effect upon that part of the Colony. The great Fish River, the course of which, with all its sinuosities, is computed at some four hundred miles in length, is at some seasons, a swollen, rapid, impassible stream; at others, its current is almost totally dried up. These are serious, admitted drawbacks; but to some extent at least they may be obviated, or mitigated by human labor and ingenuity; for where God has given water, (in many places inexhaustible under any influences of season) man can make the channel, and apply the useless stream to every purpose of agriculture and commerce. But, as we have more than once emphatically remarked, the Cape Colony languishes for want of labor and for want of capital; and until the British Government will supply the one and the British public the other, the resources of the finest country in the world must remain almost undeveloped. On these two important points, we had purposed to descant at some length, but our article has already exceded the limits which we originally assigned to it. Colonial mismanagement is only another name for Tory Government, and it would be unreasonable to expect that the Cape of Good Hope, should be spared; whilst so many other Colonies have been sacrificed by the mixture of impetuosity and incapacity, which fills the Colonial Office. The present regulations are assuredly not calculated to favor emigration to the Cape. It is not sufficient to grant a certain sum for the payment of the passage-money of emigrants; there must be such regulations established as will afford mutual protection to the laborer and to the master. We can advance nothing against a system which gives the utmost possible protection to the laborer; but the protection must not be extended only to the laborer. Whilst one party is placed above, the other must not be subjected to the influence of hostile contingencies. Security ought not to be granted to one party at the expense of the other. Much mischief we know has arisen from the improvident system of supplying before the demand has been created, and causing a glut in the labor-market. It is well that emigrants should not proceed, on mere barren speculation, to strange countries, there to suffer, in ignorance and uncertainty, many positive privations and the wearying apprehension of still worse calamities. But, at the same time, if we should encourage proprietors to import labor into the Colony, we must not subject them to almost certain loss, by inducing them to lay out capital, without conferring them any power, to secure a return for the outlay on the on arrival of the laborers in the Colony-laborers, whom perhaps the proprietor has collected at considerable trouble and expense, brought down from a midland county to the seaport, supported for some time previous to embarkation and again upon arrival at the Colony, besides defraying numerous incidental expenses, amounting in the aggregate to a considerable sum. We know parties, who have lost large sums of money, under the operation of the present system, and have been greatly disheartened by the failure of their attempts to import, for their own use, labor from Great Britain.* The difficulty, however, is not an insuperable difficulty, and, as the state and prospects of our Colonies become better understood in England, it will surely be overcome. Of the present supply of indigenous labor we had purposed to say something, but the subject, as one involving a question, not to be cursorily discussed, (we allude to the charges frequently brought, by landed proprietors, against resident Missionaries, who are accused of exercising undue influence over the emancipated slaves and other African laborers, and by raising the price of labor and increasing the difficulty of obtaining it, impeding the progress of improvement in the Colony), we shall do well to set aside for future conside ration. We conclude this article with the expression of a hope, that at least some of our Indian readers will be induced by the statements it contains, to obtain for themselves further information on a subject of so much interest, and, having done this, to consider well, whether the Cape of Good Hope be not a desirable place, to which to remove with their families and such capital as they may possess, at the end of their period of Indian servitude. We believe that the Colony possesses many advantages -especially to the man of limited income-not possessed by over-taxed, over-stocked England; and that the old Indian, retiring to such a place, will find that he lives in the enjoyment of better health and greater happiness, that his means are more ample, his opportunities greater, and the prospects of his children far better, than of those of his old associates, who, under similar circumstances, have betaken themselves to their native land. We say nothing or the subject of emigration from India, as it is one scarcely thought of at the Cape, for reasons which will at once suggest themselves to the majority of our readers. ART. III.-1. The Bagh-o-Bahar. 2. The Prem Sagar. 7. The Betal Pachisi. 8. The Muntakhabat-i-Sonda. 9. The Masnavi Mir Hasan. 10. Shakespeare's Hindustani Grammar. 11. Dr. Yates' Hindustani Grammar. HINDI, Hindustani, Braj Bhakha, Dekhani, Rekhtus, Urdu, by whichever of these various appellations it sounds most familiar to the ear, the common language of Hindustan, has a claim on the attention of every English resident in our Empire of the East. We may know nothing and care as little about the learned languages of orientalism: Sanskrit may be to us as a sealed book, and Arabic a cabalistic charm of which we desire not to possess the key; but Urdu, to give it its own genuine appellation, is mixed up with our daily and ever recurring avocations. Manifold as are the shades of this comprehensive language, the amount of each European's knowledge is more varied still. How different is the same language when spoken by the purist of Delhi or the connoisseur of Lucknow, in the mouth of the Bengali Mussulman or in that of the Benares Pandit, who rigidly abstains from the use of foreign terms, or from degrading, by the mixture of the conqueror's language, the pure and unsullied vernacular of his fathers! Again, how different is the standard of proficiency which our English in India attain! Some, like those whom the good Bishop Heber would fain have urged on to greater exertions, can just muster sufficient to order bread to be placed on the table: some, bringing their Arabic and Persian lore to bear on the study of Urdu, will argue with a learned and bigoted Mussulman on the most intricate questions of his faith; and others, though unacquainted with the purest and most polished form, from their situation and habits of intercourse with the natives, are adepts at the harsh rustic dialects, the "thenth Hindi", which is in use with a few incidental fluctuations in the out villages of a large part of Upper India. But, whatever be our partnership, we all at least have a one-anna share. Like French on the continent, it is to a certain extent the medium of communication in every part of the British dominions; and like French, we find the acquisition of a certain amount a matter of small difficulty, but the complete mastery over root and branch to be a struggle too hard for our powers. Still, from the day we landed, we have never failed to employ it as the medium of intercourse with our immediate dependants, or with those of a higher class who visit us on occasions of ceremony: we may lawfully reckon it as one added to our previous stock: perhaps it was the language into which the undistinguished sounds of our childhood finally resolved themselves, and not unfrequently we hear it faltered forth in lisping accents from the lips of our children, whose first crude perceptions, whose earliest recognition of the father and the mother are expressed in the dialect which they have so constantly heard from the mouths of their native attendants !* It is our intention in the following pages to glance at the Urdu language and literature, such as they are at present. Of the latter indeed we have formed no very high opinion, nor can we hold out to our readers any confident hopes of pleasure or profit to be derived from the perusal of its rather limited number of prose and poetical works: but, viewing it as a language, we hope to extract much that is worth consideration, whether we take it in its oldest form and rake up the past for inferences regarding the actual condition of India, or whether we regard it as one of the vehicles for the civilization of the mass of our subjects, and indulge, as we lawfully may, when the seed has been sown, in lively anticipations of a future harvest. An impenetrable darkness hangs over the earliest ages of India. The scanty accounts of the Greeks,the results of a few occasional conversations with men who were nothing more or less than the pandits of the day, and the volumes of Manu and of the Mahabharata form the only sources from which we can hope to derive any information as to the state of men and things for a considerable period before the Christian era. The historian of India has managed to extract from the pages of the Hindu Howel Dha, a tolerable account of the great frame-work of society: but the filling up of the skeleton-the colouring of the vast outline with the bright and glowing hues of reality, is a work from * The old custom of leaving all English children to the exclusive care of native servants, and making no attempt to teach them their own tongue until they were sent home at the age of five or six, has almost passed off, we are happy to say, with other equally edifying Anglo-Indian customs; and the nurseries of Chowringhi may now be heard to resound with the hymns of Watts and Keble instead of the low gali learnt from the native bearer or Ayah. which even the most ardent must turn away in despair. We could have wished to know for instance something more of the internal relations of India than we can make out from even the advanced state of things which Manu has depicted. Whether Sanskrit was used by one particular caste or castes on all occasions, or even by them only on matters of importance or ceremony how lands were held and transferred: whether the king recognised the proprietary right of men who cleared and tilled the jungle at their own expense, or whether he laid his embargo upon the enterprising spirit of individuals, and required them invariably to acknowledge him as the Lord paramount of the soil: what terms were used to designate Îand tenures before the inruption of Persian phrases and their almost universal adoption in matters of contract and sale: what was the amount of crime and of vice: whether dacoity was not a profession as popular as that of highwaymen in England two centuries ago, and far exceeding the utmost returns of the present day: whether a golden age, or more properly a Satya Yug, was not as ideal in India as the same beautiful fiction among the poets of the West :-these are a few of the questions with which we now perplex ourselves in vain, and to answer which—if indeed they can ever be answered -we must wait till the stores of knowledge within our reach have been thoroughly digested and combined. We might, however, were but a little allowance given to hypothesis, pourtray to ourselves the early state of Hindustan before the time of Mahmud of Ghuzni. The inhabitant of the sea coast could pursue his petty trade and barter with those adventurous spirits, who, tempting the open sea, made their annual trip from the Eastern coasts of Arabia to those of Malabar and Ceylon. The inland peasant would wring from the encroachments of the jungle his two or three roods of fertile soil, and enjoy in his own village a government as simple as that of the patriarchs, but whose influence was as widely acknowledged over India as that of Roman jurisprudence over the face of modern Europe. But the time had now come when the undivided authority of the old priestcraft, which, with a foresight we cannot help admiring, had raised for itself an unyielding bulwark on the foundations of prejudice and pride, was to bend before the advance of a power on which both Asia and Europe had gazed with awe. The sovereign, whose proudest boast it was to be a breaker of idols, armed with all the bigotry of his creed and the fiery temper of his race, and animated by the spirit of a restless borderer, rushed down in a series of forays on the wide provinces of Upper India. The riches of |