arrival of the laborers in the Colony-laborers, whom perhaps the proprietor has collected at considerable trouble and expense, brought down from a midland country 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 consider

ation.

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 opportunites 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 on 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.

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 the 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 land 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

Somnat and the holy temples of Mathura were alike profaned by the invader's touch: the ringing tones of Affghanistan's mountaineers were heard to sound in the sanctuaries of Gujarat: the Mamluk of Turkey roved in the lordly halls of Canouj; and the wild cries of the Tartar horse disturbed those sacred shades, where Krishna, in the true spirit of an eastern Apollo, once had loved to sport with the Gopis!

We can have no doubt that the introduction of foreign words began with Mahmud's invasion, and kept steadily on the increase until the times of Akbar and his successors. In the preface to the well-known story of the Bagh-o-Bahar there is an account of the formation of the Urdu language, which bears on its surface every convincing mark of probability. It is, as far as we can recollect, the only attempt at a critical disquisitionone indeed uncongenial to the native-in the whole range of the literature. The author, after launching out into the praises of Gilchrist and the Marquis of Wellesley with something more than the usual ground for an Oriental laudatory address, gives us a history of the formation of his native tongue as handed down by tradition.

"The following is the account of the Urdu language which I have heard from the mouths of old men. The metropolis of Delhi, with Hindus, is of the date of the four ages. Its kings and subjects were established there from early times, and were in the habit of speaking their own vernacular tongue (Bhaka). But Mussulman dynasties have now endured for a thousand years: first came Mahmud of Ghuzni, and then the princes of Ghori and Lodi. As intercourse increased the lan'guages of the Hindu and the Mussulman became to a certain extent mixed. Last of all came Timur, in whose family the royal descent remains up to this day, and he took Hindustan. After his arrival the camp of the army was fixed in the city, ' and the bazar itself received the name of Urdu. After this, Humayun, when harassed by the Pathans, became a sojourner ' away from India. On his return he punished the Pasmand and 'Pathan races, so that no turbulent spirits were left to foment 'strife and rebellion. When Akbar came to sit on the throne ' various races from all four quarters, on hearing the kind patronage and bounty of that incomparable family, came and presented themselves before him; but the language and dialect of each individual were different; when they came to live, traffic, buy and sell amongst each other, one single language, termed Urdu, became definitively fixed."

6

Slender as this account is, we owe its compiler considerable thanks for having thus treasured up a few of the sayings which

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