the great image; this is, no doubt, a real part of the whole. But then the fractional edge recalls that it is only a portion, and ought to be replaced in its former position. But if I again knead it up and round it off into a separate work, betraying no violent dislocation, it ceases to be any thing but a fiction of my hands. I cannot make it a small total, recalling in minuter lines, and representing the great one, because the great one is too vast, and I see it only in part. An Illiad was very well, because those for whom it was written believed it all true, read it as history, and had no more doubt of Jupiter and Pallas than of Achilles and Agamemnon. To us, who have looked at the wrong side of the puppet-show, it has lost half its value. But remember, besides, that the free extemporaneous Homeric rythm is very unlike our modern metres. To me it seems that the very fact of writ ing in artificial elaborate verse is a proclamation of a design to be absurd." "Verse ought to be, and to have the evidence of being, the spontaneous and only suitable utterance of lively and delightful emotion. If not, doubtless it is bad and a trick." "Almost all I know of, indeed, is So. As for the verse of Homer and Shakspeare it is only prose fused and fluid. But almost all else is prose pinched, twisted, filed, scraped, and notched into arbitrary forms, in hopes, not of producing any independent feeling, but of awakening some echo of the feeling which the authentic melody of words begets. But, in fine, explain it how you will, all fiction in verse or prose is to me abhorrent. I hate straw-men, snow-men, rag-men, colossal dolls, bronze kings and dukes, and all the sons of scarecrows. I loathe your modern romance which sets up its tawdry wooden Highlanders and calumetted Indians at the door with as keen an eye to gain, and to the public's gross cravings, as the keeper of a snuff-shop. We have not too much thought and energy among us for actual life, and it is idiotic to waste what we have in aimless sympathies, and to spend our days in tracing out the baby-house labyrinths of songs and sornets. What would you think of a man who, when his ship was sinking, and the only chance lay in working with every sinew, should begin to fiddle on the deck, and set the sailors off in an insane dance? We, and the world too, are in just this need, and the poets help us a little." Walsingham answered calmly,"I do not remember that the seamen in the Greek story were much the better for throwing Arion overboard." "Ah! I suppose in that tale some poet was pleading his own cause and that of his brethren. In this matter, however, we shall not agree; but I do hold most firmly to the belief that the task of life is a hard, stern, Spartan work-to climb with bleeding feet among rocks of ice and lava. We must have done, once for all, with cobwebs and rose-vapours, election ribbons and rockets, flummery and finery of all kinds. Sentimental sighing has no business in a world where there are so many heart-brokengroans. The will is the foundation of a man. He should stand up-speak out-hold fast-stamp his thoughts in strong words-and leave lies, songs, flatteries, fancies, and all other mental sillabub whatever to womanish and sickly stomachs. Then when he stands, as I often do, alone upon the bare hill-top, and thinks of the laws, maxims, amiabilities, decencies, and reputations that make up what we call our country, and which are but one great fermenting mass of falsehood, let him rejoice that he dares keep his own soul pure and in arms, and breathe the air of heaven which has not yet been all filled with the reek of men's vanity and voluptuousness. For in our smooth, delicate, moral days, even conscience has been made nothing more than a kind of voluptuous self-indulgence. O! for some rude old John Baptist or Wickliffe, to go through the land and cry, Wo! Wo! and make our feeble busy men of talents and notoriety, and European reputation-Heaven help them!-skip at his voice like grasshoppers from before the tramp of a rhinoceros." "Why should not he who so strongly conceives also perform?" "O! a man may fancy indeed that his arms are long enough to reach the stars; but when, in trying even to raise them above his own head, they have been heavily beaten back and crushed by the demon of the air, he must be content, for a while at least, to rest, and nurse his pangs. But you, you for whose pipings and madrigals the world has smooth and favourable ears, you, had you the heart of a man instead of the fancy of a conjurer, might indeed find or make the sad hour for speaking severe truths; you might inspirit and shame men into the work of painfully building up for themselves new, and graver, and more serene hopes, instead of lulling them into a drunken dream with wanton airs and music:" Walsingham shook his head, but not angrily, and said " One builds Cyclopian walls, another fashions marble carvings. Each must work as he can. But remember that the Cyclopian walls, though they stood indeed, and stand, became useless monuments of a dead past, and the fox and the robber kennel among the stones. The marble carvings which humanized their own early age are still the delight of all human generations." 66 Ay, but those marble carvings, for those who wrought and revered them, were most holy realities. Our modern poems and other tinsel work are, for us, as mere toys as musical snuff-boxes or gauze flowers." "To him who regards them as mere toys they are indeed worthless, nay, dangerous. That which he handles as a squib, he may find burst between his fingers as a bomb. But of such men, and those who work for them, there need be no discourse between us." "Of such men I fear there must be discourse between us, if we are to discourse at all, and in speaking not forget ourselves." CHAPTER XII. They bade each other good-night, and lay back in their chairs at opposite sides of the fire. Collins went to sleep. But Walsingham sat revolving the conversation that had passed and his present position. He thought that he saw most distinctly the fallacy of his host's views as to poetry; and judged from this evening's experience that he was not a very acute reasoner, so far at least, as reasoning is carried on by analysis. He also regarded him as narrow and partial in all his feelings and aims, viewing many things with undue violence, and with undeserved indifference turning from others. The mind, he said to himself, of this recluse resembles a smith's forge, with its small glowing light, its deep imaginative shadows, the strenuous image of the workman, and the weighty and colossal processes to which the whole is devoted. "Well," he thought," let others forge crowbars and ploughshares, nay, even weapons and armour; enough for me, in my sunny chamber, with vine-leaves round the windows, to mould graceful figures, or even to engrave the small and unobtrusive gem." His mind, however, did not rest here. He could not escape from the feeling that, after all, there was in Collins an earnest though rugged and painful force of some kind, whether of will, or feeling, or imagination, which bore down the poet. This energy but half understood itself, and was unaccompanied by any sense of the graceful, the harmonious, the complete, without which life to Walsingham appeared so bare and empty. It was a character which, in its dim but broken strength, and large though interrupted outline, seemed to him more imposing than any other he had known, than all that he could find in himself. His curiosity and his sympathy with the mysterious were awakened, and were excited the more by his ignorance of the previous history, which in spite of fervid longings after a high course of human action, had thrown Collins into this solitude a brooding aimless hermit. Now, as was his custom, he began to collect and arrange all he knew of the man, and the recent circumstances that had brought them acquainted. But here his thoughts were turned into a different direction, for, with the events of the evening, the image of Maria recurred to him. He recalled his previous feelings of admiration for her; his delight in her pure, unselfish elevation of heart; his own intellectual superiority, which had enabled him to see over and round her opinions; and the coldness and weakness of his faith in invisible realities, compared with her devout and practical reliance. The unspeakable loveliness of her whole being presented itself anew to him; and he reflected with how much pleasure he had been able to give her fresh knowledge, and to set her mind in movement in new di rections. For while his suggestions forms broke at once upon him. He and ideas rooted themselves in her, had now before his eyes together, and re-appeared in gentler and more Arthur and Sir Charles, Wilson and attractive forms in her demeanour and Hastings, Musgrave and Walsing. language, she had seemed to him a ham. The student, the baronet, the nymph-like Grecian girl, catching farmer, the traveller, the divine, the new hints of melody and themes of poet-each seemed to him perfectly verse from a sage master, by her distinct, yet as to each he had a train voice and instrument, her sunny beauty of evident remembrances, and each and lyrical glances lending to them he fancied was himself. So might he roundness, fluency, and a thrilling have stood in the midst of many large sweetness. Lastly, he reviewed the mirrors, each bright and speckless, singular hour that he had spent with but each of a differently coloured her in the ruined church, and was glass, a blue, a red, a green, a golden, conscious of a mingled rush of pain an amethyst, a white, and seen him. and joy while he revived for a moment self, his own form, face, gesture, and the free and mounting flight of heart expression of countenance reflected in with which they had seemed to live each of the surfaces, but with the diftogether in the tempest and rise upon ference of colouring. But again it its wings above the ordinary restraints seemed that the difference overbalancof custom and reserve. It was a less ed the identity, and that he beheld selfish train of emotion, more elevat- only so many several figures, passing ing and enthusiastic than he had al- for the same one man by wearing a most ever experienced. But along mask the fac-simile of his face. As with the remembrance of it came that the hour glided on, the various forms of the discovery of her secret affec- grew less and less distinct, though his tion, though for whom he could not inward recollection of their history divine. From this he would fain have was still clear. He now turned 1.3 withdrawn his attention, for he habi- eyes upon the sleeping countenance tually endeavoured to turn away from of Collins, with its bold and harsh all painful considerations. But the lines still full of melancholy and enerfacts were too recent, and she was getic meaning, and with hair so prestill too near him. A few feet and a maturely gray shading the furrowed thin ceiling were all that divided him brow and beating temples. All the from the sleeping girl. Love with impressions of the evening came upon his torch lighted the poet's imagina- him with redoubled power. He saw tion up the dark stair. He seemed to in that face a long inscription to which see the beautiful and animated head he required the key. Even without now reclining in still unconsciousness its help he knew of a concentered zeal on the pillow; the delicate and benign and torrid vigor, narrow perhaps in hand and rounded arm escaping from its objects and experience, but having the folds designed to hide them; the a depth and genuineness of life found smooth eyelids, with their dark lashes in few among mankind, and especially closed, and the full, half-parted lips. rare in profusely accomplished and Over all the enchanted picture of his refined periods and classes. He said fancy he viewed the silent dream- to himself-I understand and can paint world opened to her spirit, with a thousand modes of human existence, many images of which his own was from the hero and the sage, to the one, blended in the front, and a dark damsel, the child, and the rude barbaand fiery cloud of destiny, like the rian slave. But there is one characsmoke of that night's conflagration, ter that seems to lie beyond me wrapopaque to him, though for her trans- ped in its own dark electric cloud. parent, hiding the main and central This, too, shall now lie clear under my figure so incomparably dear to Maria. gaze and be wielded by my will. The hour of twelve came. The clear picture of the lady in her chamber vanished, the long and busy past, with its prominent and struggling The ring did not refuse its function; and Walsingham slept in utter oblivion. END OF PART II. AFFAIRS IN THE EAST. EVERY body knows that our empire in the East is entirely of one opinion; that the vast realms of Hindostan have been won by the sword, and must be maintained by the sword; and that it depends upon the chance of perpetual success, not merely for its prosperity, but for its existence. Forty or fifty thousand Europeans, including fiveand-twenty thousand soldiers, are there to be found scattered among ninety millions of Asiatice, directly subjected to their empire, and a still greater number in the tributary and allied states. How so small a body of Europeans should ever have succeeded in acquiring and maintaining an empire at the distance of eight thousand miles from the British islands, over so immense a body, most of them hardly inferior to the European race in hardihood and valour, trained to discipline, and supplied with military implements of war fully as powerful, will be a subject of never-ceasing astonishment, and is not rightly appreciated by this generation, only because, like any other prodigy with which we have long been familiar, it has ceased to be an object of present surprise. But one thing is perfectly plain, and must be quite obvious even to the most superficial observer, that such an empire can be maintained only by the most consummate wisdom and firmness on the part of the local government-by the maintenance of a powerful European force, and by the most sedulous attention, both to the material interests and the rights of property in the immense mass of our Oriental subjects. Even if no external danger threatened; if no northern power was at hand to take advantage of any weakness in our Indian administration, and no northern diplomacy to combine the Courts of Central Asia into a powerful league against us, still, commonsense has long demonstrated to every man capable of thinking, and acquainted with the subject, that our Indian empire stood on the most precarious foundation; and that by disaffection among the native troops, almost before the alarming tidings could reach the British shores, the splendid fabric might be levelled with the dust. What, then, has been the policy of the British Government? Have they employed the precious years of peace in our Eastern dominions in increasing our European force-augmenting our native military establishment-conciliating the affections of the native soldiers-strengthening our frontier towards the north and west, and securing ourselves by alliances among the powers of Central Asia? Have we established a powerful fleet of armed steamboats on the Indus, and rendered that great river, seventeen hundred miles in length, the true frontier of Hindostan against European or Asiatic power, an impenetrable barrier to hostile arms? Have we established military camps on its shores, and erected forts to support the operations of the frontier troops, and established a national force capable of supporting those in front in case of disaster? Have we conciliated the affections of the inhabitants in our rear, and secured the attachment of the native troops by liberal allowances and retired establishments held safely? Have we promoted industry through Hindostan by opening to it the unfettered market of the British Empire, and won the hearts of all classes by the impartial administration of the revenue, and the steady security given to existing land rights? Alas! we have done the very reverse of all these things; and in order to enable our readers to form some estimate of the infatuation which, for the last ten years, has pervaded our Indian Councils, under the influence of the parsimonious, niggardly ideas of the masses at home, we shall subjoin a slight sketch of the steps which have been taken to injure our magnificent Eastern dominions during the disastrous era of Reform, which will probably excite some attention from the evident approach of the time when the effects of our policy and the strength of our empire there are to be put to the test. We possessed, fifteen years ago, two line of battle ships, and several strong frigates in the Indian ocean, having their principal station at Bombaya force amply sufficient to have se cured our predominance in the Persian Gulf, and rendered certain the co-operation of Muscat, and all the powers on the shores of Persia and Arabia. We have sold off, or dismantled, the whole of this fleet, in order to make a show of reduced expenditure. The India Company have not a ship of war of their own in the Indian Ocean, and whatever ships we may send there will form a deduction from the naval strength of Great Britain. We had till very lately just three weak battalions on the Indus, and the nearest troops to support them in the rear were a hundred and fifty miles distant. While neglecting thus our foreign defences, we have still more ruinously weakened our internal resources. We have reduced the European native force, which, in 1827, was 33,000, to twenty-five regiments, mustering little more than 19,000 men, and the native army, which in the former year was 260,000, to 155,000. All this we have done in the full knowledge of the truth emphatically impressed upon our Government by our greatest commanders in India, even at the moment of their most signal triumphs, that, without an adequate proportion of European troops, which should never be less than a third or fourth of that of the native soldiers, it was impossible to expect success in India, and that our empire in the East, on the appearance of the first European power, would be se. riously endangered. Nor is this all. In addition to this diminution of the numbers of our military establishments, we have taken steps still more decisively calculated to alienate the affections of those whom we retained under our standards. Forgetting that there can be no inherent loyalty in a black Mussulman, or Hindoo, to a white Christian, and distant Crown, we have done much to dissolve the firm bond of union that has hitherto held us togetherthat of permanent self-interest. Influenced by a blind and false spirit of economy, the Indian Government have successively reduced the allowances, retired pensions, and other advantages accruing to the officers, European and native, as well as privates of the native army, so that not only has the attachment of those actually in the ranks been seriously weakened, but the disposition to enlist under the British colours, throughout the whole peninsula, been chilled and discouraged to a most alarming degree. Serious as are the dangers that threaten our Indian possessions from those measures of reduction and economy, there are other internal changes which are, perhaps, still more cala. mitous, because productive of discontent more deep-seated and evils more incurable. The error committed by Lord Cornwallis, of introducing European ideas of feudal property into the East, and holding, contrary to all Asiatic principle, that the zemindar or collector is the real proprietor, instead of the ryot or cultivator, had been attended in many of the provinces where it has been established with the most disastrous consequences, and led, in some districts, to the great impoverishment of the inhabitants. The land-rent, constituting two-thirds of the whole reve. nue of India, has fallen off two millions of late years, from the impossibility of extracting their quit-rents from the cultivators, ruined by oppressive management. The perpetual settlement, established in 1792, could not, perhaps, be altogether abrogated, but regulations should have been introduced to protect the cultivator; and yet nothing of the kind effectual has been attempted. So far from this, the power of judging in revenue cases, which constitute by far the most important in the Indian courts, has been vested in the European collectors of the revenue. This is not only a dangerous proceeding, but it throws discredit upon the whole system of our Indian Administration. There is not indeed a more upright and conscientions set of men than the Company's civil servants in India; but human nature is weak, and it may be easily conceived what a host of contagions must assail a judge, when, at the very moment when his regular income has been materially reduced by economical parings of late years, he finds himself entrusted with the decision of all questions between the Government and the people connected with the land revenue within his jurisdiction, and knows by experience that the regular remittance of a large sum quar. terly from head-quarters is the best possible means of securing the favours of the dispensers of patronage on which his future fortune depends. Then, a most alarming step has been taken of late years, which has spread |