hand, the unseemly and revolting caricatures presented to us by the few writers who, for their own amusement or Mr. Colburn's profit, have made the experiment; and on the other, the tame and spiritless sketchings, in which all that is distinguishing and prominent is wholly lost and obliterated?

Impressed with the utility of this mode of proceeding, in order to arrive at a just criterion of society and manners, whether amongst the English residents at Paris, or the English at Rome, or in whatever country curiosity or restlessness may have dispersed them (for wherever our countrymen are, with whatever community they may come into contact, there they remain, like oil and water, unmixed and immiscible), I am sincerely convinced that it is the best mode of estimating the English societies of India; and I lament that the ground has been quite untrodden, or nearly so, by those who have lately published their reminiscences of that interesting region; for I conceive that the being, so strangely compounded, whom we call here "an old Indian," that odd bundle of whims and humours, whether considered by himself, as the being, formed and fashioned by the circumstances that were constantly acting upon him whilst in India, or the whole Anglo-Indian society of that country altogether, who are undergoing the actual

discipline of those circumstances, do assuredly deserve the compliment of a more specific delineation than has been hitherto assigned them. To these, perhaps, the rule I have laid down will be found more emphatically applicable than to our countrymen in any other part of the world. An Englishman in France or Italy still remains the Englishman, carrying thither only his follies, his arrogance, and his prejudices, and stands out in prominent relief from the countries he visits, by the peculiarity of his cherished follies and beloved vices; whereas in India, by the concurrence of various causes of sure and uniform operation, some of which I shall point out, the English character undergoes a transformation so rapid and entire, as to render it the fittest study that can be imagined for the moral painter.

I must repeat, then, the subject of English society in India has been uniformly neglected by all who have visited Hindustan, with the exception, perhaps, of Maria Graham (not now, indeed, Maria Graham, for that fascinating combination of sounds, associated with the enlivening remembrances of youth and personal charms, is now merged in a second marriage and another name not half so pleasing and familiar to my ears)-that delightful writer of travels, who saw manners and noted them with the

exquisite nicety of female discernment, on which every shade, and tint, and colour of character, primitive or mixed, never fails to be reflected. But more of her hereafter. With this exception, however, I have searched in vain the publications of residents and travellers in India, without stumbling upon one correct portrait of Anglo-Indian society; any thing that may be instructive as a lesson to young men, or may hold up to our young countrywomen, who are about to quit the shores of our "fair, domestic stream," for those which the Ganges washes with his mighty waters, a mirror of what they are hereafter to become, through the influence of climate, marriage, musquitoes, and the varied assemblage of causes likely to operate upon them, when they arrive in a country which is considered, I fear but too justly, as the grave of European beauty.

What a useful supplementary chapter to Dr. Fordyce, or Mrs. Chapone, would this furnish! Something of this kind is surely necessary, if on no other ground, on that of good taste, to give a little pleasing variety to the writings upon India, which the press is every day bringing into the world, and which weigh as heavily upon the forbearance of the general reader as upon the counters of the booksellers. For without something of the

kind, "Ten Years' Residence in India," and "Reminiscences" of I know not how many years of service, begin to be rather sickening; and no wonder, as they are for the most part refaccimentos of by-gone campaigns; the dregs and rinsings of old officers' memories; the scrapings of barrack-room conversations, where, over a cheerless bottle or two (the slowness of whose revolutions speaks whole volumes against the diminution of batta), some poor complaisant Sub is obliged with polite quiescence to listen to the endless narrative which "fights the battle o'er again"-the same prosy detail which is so soon to arrive in the propitious region of New Burlington Street, and after it has received its due share of pruning and polish at the maturing hands of Mr. Shuckburgh, to take its place in what is called by courtesy "the literature of the day."

But the taste for this is going by. Who is there that can be interested at this time of day with an Indian battle fought twenty years ago? What reader is endued with such an overflowing sensibility as to spare one drop of it for the fate of a thousand polygars (if they had been so many Polly Carrs, the narrative might have some interest), whose only virtue seems to have been their hereditary hate to the Panjalum-choorchy race; or to weep the premature loss of Captain Trotter of the

cavalry, who, by too quick a trot was carried into the hottest fire of the enemy; or the wound of Captain Hazard, who felt so cruelly the chances of war in his right arm; or the hair-breadth escape of Lieutenant Beard, whose chin was grazed by a ball, and who came off providentially, with the loss only of a third of his whisker (these are not puns, dear reader, but veracious facts *); or feast with delight upon pages filled with lists of the killed and wounded? For heaven's sake, let us have something more than this. "Call a new cause!" Lord Mansfield used to say, with infinite complacency, when he was worn out with the one he had been trying. What we want is man, male or female, imported from England into India, with his English notions, English tastes, English antipathies, acted upon by the thousand influences that gradually modify him into a different animal, till, without knowing it,-for, whilst he is there, goitrelike, a host of similar examples prevent him from suspecting his own transformation,- he comes back again to his native land the finished "old Indian," the consummate but interesting nondescript, which in common parlance has acquired that appellative.

See "Military Reminiscences of Forty Years' Service in India," by Lieut.-Col. Welsh ; 1830.