SOCIETY AND MANNERS.

ENGLISH SOCIETY IN INDIA.

I.

MAN is a mysterious compound of active and passive will. The former, unless in a few rare and enviable cases, it is seldom given him to exercise. By the latter, he is every hour, in this "working-day world," influenced, modified, I might say, created. I hate all I hate all your metaphysical jargon, which seems only invented for the concealment of ignorance, and am, therefore, truly solicitous to avoid it. But shall I be misunderstood if I call active will the principle which, when in some solitary insulated instances it comes into operation, animates, exalts, and o'er-informs us with something akin to divine inspirationthat divinam particulam auræ, which bursts by

its own inextinguishable energies beyond the fetters and impediments of the external circumstances which train and educate by far the greater part of mankind, and mould and fashion all the every-day specimens of humanity that walk or strut upon the habitable globe? It is, then, the passive will, that almost voluntary submission to extrinsic influences and over-ruling motives, which in the pride of our hearts we deem ourselves capable of withstanding, but which is even then the most irresistible at the moment we are most striving to resist it;—it is this which, in every philosophical survey of our genus, and in every precise investigation of our moral history, ought primarily to be regarded. For it is this that makes the individual, or, in other words, constitutes his idiosyncracy; and not of the individual only, but of the larger combinations as well as lesser platoons of human society.

Of the few who, by the exercise of an active will, rise superior to all outward circumstances, standing like rocks amidst the waves and storms of motives that assail us, and wholly unmoved and immoveable by the impulses which are so omnipotent in the formation both of single and collective man, the history is written in prodigies of super-human virtue ;-in action or words doomed

never to die ;-in whole lives of stern and inflexible self-denial;-in the thoughts and imaginations which will never taste death, but endure in their living form and indestructible essence through the endless track of ages. Of these, standing alone and at long and awful intervals, as if they were marks to shew the height which the flood of glory, or of genius, or of virtue, has now and then reached-of these, in treating of society and of manners, it is evident that I can have little to say ;-but it is with the second class of beings that I concern myself-a class falling within the scope of our experience, and furnishing a much more agreeable exercise for our speculations than those who, by appearing in such irregular cycles amongst us, seem in some sort to have abdicated the common wholesale properties of our nature. Compared with the oio

v ävōgeç sioì, they are of another and higher order, scarcely united with us by the tie of human weakness or human folly, the strongest ties by which man is confederated with man,-claiming appreciation by a different standard, and not liable to the wear and tear of the common motives which impel us;-they are, therefore, of too colossal a stature, and of a mould too gigantic, to be useful or pleasing objects of contemplation.

It is then the surest process for philosophical

thinkers, who undertake the delineation of the characteristic manners of any definite class of mankind (and without some tincture of philosophical thinking no picture can be faithful or vivid), to watch narrowly the external discipline of circumstances, which affect the disposition, the temper, and the character, rather than simply enumerate, as travellers are too apt to do, the mere naked phenomena themselves, without taking any note of each extrinsic cause that has its share in their formation. It is because they have not given themselves the trouble to become familiar with this important part of the human mechanism, or, in other language, with the whole tribe of impulses by which the passive will is hurried along in spite of its feeble resistance, that the numerous writers upon India, who have appeared lately amongst us in swarms that almost "darken the air," have scarcely attempted, except in a few instances of manifest failure, a sketch of English society and English manners in India. Do not for a moment let it be thought, that I am vain enough to imagine that I am about to supply the deficiency, either to my own satisfaction, or that of my readers; but may I not succeed in giving a few hints at least to future limners even by my own unfinished daubings, and suggest the propriety of shunning, on the one