ART. II.-1. Sale's Translation of the Koran-Bath, 1795. 2. Bernier's Travels, translated by John Steuart, Calcutta, 1826. 3. Bernier's History of the late revolution of the Empire of the Great Mogul-Englished out of French. London, 1671. Calcutta, 1824. 4. History of Nadir Shah, by James Fraser. 2d Edition. London, 1742. 5. Life of Nadir Shah. Extracted from an Eastern M. S. trans- lated into French. By William Jones, Esq. 6. Observations on the Mussulmans of India. Hassan Ali. London, 1832. By Mrs. Meer 7. Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians. By E. W. Lane. London, 1836. 8. A Memoir of Central India, by Major General Malcolm. London, 1825. 9. Urquhart's Spirit of the East. Henry Colburn. London, 1838. 10. Dow's History of Hindostan. London, 1812. 11. Account of the Kingdom of Caubul. Mountstuart Elphinstone. London, 1839. By the Honorable 12. The History of Persia, by Sir John Malcolm. Murray. London, 1815.* TURNING Over a large collection of children's books-and the children's books of the present day are so great an improvement on those of the past, that we often envy the intellectual pleasures of the rising generation-we have just alighted upon one with the title of "Facts to correct Fictions." Necessary as it often is to carry out the design, which these words convey, it is assuredly never so necessary, as when India is the great subject of discourse; for, in European countries, there are current more fictions, and fewer facts, of which India and the neighbouring regions are the staple, than any other subject puts in circulation. The fictions are imbibed in early youth; the facts are taught by hard experience, or never. We begin life with splendid delusions, learnt from the Arabian Nights, and • We do not prefix the above Catalogue to our present remarks, with any affectation of reviewing the books it enumerates, but as the most convenient way of at once setting before our readers the authorities from whom we are about, chiefly, to draw our illustrations. They are works of old date; but confining ourselves exclusively to Indian topics, we cannot hope to be supplied with a succession of new works sufficient to keep our machinery going. Our Review, therefore, must partake more or less of the Retrospective. the scenic melodramas of the London stage; as we advance, the gorgeous poetry of Lalla Rookh stamps these delusions still more deeply on our mind; and we go on, from year to year, still fancying, still dreaming, until the reality is presented to the fleshly eye; and then the many-colored bubble is burst, and, running as mortals will run into extremes, we see nothing but hard, dry, dull, common-place facts; "the beautiful has vanished and returns not;" and we cannot bring ourselves to believe that the country, which once we looked upon as the region of romance, is to be viewed in any picturesque aspect. We are disappointed, and disappointment deadens our sensibilities. The imagination will make no compromises. INDIA,-how many a young fancy has indulged itself with bright visions of this gorgeous land; how many a young heart panted eagerly to visit these fairy regions of bright romance. The school-boy, eager for a life of activity, and taught from his childhood to look to the "shining orient," Where in wild Mahratta battle fell his father evil-starred, as the theatre of his future exploits, dreams of turbaned horsemen, and glittering scimitars, and snorting Arabs; scans in the prospect the gorgeous parade of an Eastern camp; magnificent tents and castellated elephants, and all the pride and pomp of war in a land, where all is proud and pompous; sees himself in imagination, the conqueror of Rajahs, whose robes are hemmed with jewels and the trappings of whose horses are of gold; and beholds heaped up before him the spolia opima of conquest-the richest silks, and the finest muslins, and the costliest gems, and heaps of mohurs and pagodas-Before the mental eye of the young maiden flit gentler visions than these. She dreams of the soft balmy air, the melodious bulbul, the gushing waters, the coral strand of Ind. She sees tall palm trees and browsing camels, rose-gardens and citron-groves. thinks of the blue rivers; the fair lands, Whose mountain pregnant by the beam She of the fertile valleys; of the white cities; of the gilded minarets; the dark-eyed daughters of the East. She thinks of Hindostan as the region of romance; the chosen home of love; where life is a succession of stirring incidents and the heart of man the home of passionate thoughts. She longs to quit the chilly conventional atmosphere of European Society and to begin a new life in the exciting East. Fiction has done its work upon her. She longs to realise her rosy dreams. And then if it be permitted to youth or maiden to change the romance for the reality of Indian life, how soon are all the airy fabrics demolished-how soon does the spell dissolve and the fairy-raised carriage with its liveried attendants subside into pumpkins and mice. For a few days, there is a certain sense of strangeness; the eye is not at once accommodated to the sight of snow-white garments and mahogany-coloured skins; there is a whirl of not very pleasurable excitement and then the reaction begins. "And this is India?" the disappointed dreamer exclaims, not without bitterness of spirit-and thenceforward he sees nothing in the country but what is essentially commonplace-unromantic, unpicturesque. He escapes from one error only to fall into another. If when India was to him an unknown land-orrather a land unvisited, for by many though visited it ever is unknown-he indulged in over-wrought visions of its romantic aspects, his subsequent estimate falls as far short of the truth, as his anticipations had exceeded it. Arrived in India, as though exasperated by his former credulity, he is unjust to the country, for which in the ardour of youth he panted. The most eager lover often becomes the most phlegmatic husband—the wife is undervalued as much as the charms of the mistress have been exaggerated. A sort of discontented torpor supervenes; and to Indian Romance he is stone-blind. He cannot believe that in India the romantic and the picturesque can possibly have any place. And yet if he would but open his eyes, he would see that he is surrounded by the romantic and picturesque. It is in part familiarity, in part ignorance, that leads him to reject, with scorn, the belief in India's romance. In one case too much is before him, in the other toolittle to enable him to form a correct judgment. The white turband; the dark eye; the curled moustache, and the flowing muslin robes of an Indian domestic are precisely the same things which he has seen on the stage or in the illustrations of the "Arabian Nights." They are, as picturesque accompaniments, no less superior to the powdered head, the white neckcloth, the tail coat, and the knee breeches of an English footman, than the most vivid imagination can have conceived them to be; but with his name entered in a little book endorsed "Servants' Wages," opposite to the sum of 8 Rs. the "dark-eyed moslem" loses at once all his picturesque attributes and becomes a very unromantic khitmudgar, to be abused, fined, perhaps beaten at discretion. On the very country itself he revenges himself. The first glimpse of it disappoints him; and from that hour And peculiarly strong is the disappointment of all who enter India by the Hooghly. A recent writer of fiction gives the following somewhat overcharged picture of the disappointment and dismay, which the first sight of our eastern shores occasion-"What an uncommonly fine thing in poetry is the rolling tide of the sinuous Ganges-but how wretchedly unpoetical is this said Ganges in reality as you enter it from the Bay of Bengal. It is not common place, for the utter absence 6 he determines to see no beauty in it-" nothing can bring back the hour of glory in the grass, of splendor in the flower," which his young imagination conjured up. The sky is as blue; the trees are as tall; the rivers are as grand; the vegetation as luxuriant, as he had seen them in his own fancy or on the walls of Somerset-House: but his eye will not form the whole into a picturesque landscape. There is glare and dust; and both are to be shut out; and the luxuriant herbage is condemned as jungle, suggesting thoughts of dire disease, and the plantain and cocoanut trees excite contempt, accompanied with a longing after the more delicious fruits of our own snug island. Drawbacks are there, it must be acknowledged many and great. "When Aboo Talib Khan"—we quote from a pamphlet, written some fifteen years ago by Mr. Robertson, late Lieutenant-Governor of the N. W. Provinces-" whose appearance in London about the beginning of the century, excited such a sensation, even in the highest circles, returned to India, he obtained a situation in the Revenue Department, in the district of Bundlekhund on the western side of the river Jumna. One morning, he called upon the judge of the district, with whom his manners (acquired during his residence in England) had placed him upon a more intimate footing than is generally established between the European and native functionaries in India. It was at the most sultry season of the year and whilst the hot winds were blowing with the utmost fury. Aboo Talib called his English friend to a window and pointing to the dreary scene without, the arid plain, the lurid atmosphere, heavy with dust and breathing intolerable heat, the brown and burning winter of a torrid clime, he exclaimed, “Look at that, Sir! Do you think that God Almighty ever meant this country for an Englishman to reside in ?" 6 There are, doubtless, frequent temptations to ask this question; and often, in querulousness and discontent, is it asked, when no sufficient reason for such questionings exists. But it is diffi cult to induce people to look upon the bright side of the pic of one redeeming feature to render it in the least degree picturesque prevents it from being that. It is in fact, almost sublime from the utter absence of beauty it exhibits It is so desolate so unlovely, so unearthly in its aspect, that, as you look upon it, you can scarcely believe it to be a part of that world which God made, and said that it was good. After a sojourn of months on the great waters, the first sight of land, if there be anything about it that wears the least look of gladsomeness, is hailed by the weary voyager, as a very Paradise, and is decked out as he views it with the eye of his imagination, in exaggerated tints of joyousness and beauty; but for the voyager as he enters the Hooghly river, though there be youth on his cheek, and hope in his heart, and abundant fancy in his brain, there is not one object to gladden his eye, not one sight to raise pleasant expectations. All seems characteristic of the world he is about to enter, where sickness and death and desolation are the grand ingredients of the cup that is offered to him."-Peregrine Pultuney. ture-difficult to induce them to look with interest upon what is really interesting. Not only is there on the surface, if we would condescend to look at it, much that is picturesque and attractive; but beneath the surface of Indian life is there a rich vein of romance, which would afford many a lesson to the student of humanity. It is too much the fashion to undervalue what is Indian. That which is noticeable in itself is not to be noticed because it is Indian. A returned Anglo-Indian will peradventure walk miles in England to see an aloe in bloom, though he would not when in India, condescend to look at one, blooming on the margin of his own compound. It is in the same spirit that the Anglo-Indian reads with interest, the murders detailed in the London papers, however unromantic the character of the events, in which they originated; but can rarely be persuaded that any interest attaches to records of murders, committed by natives upon natives of India, though the events, which led to them be of the same character as those which form the staple of poetical romances. Interesting though they be in themselves, they are Indian-and, therefore, to be turned away from with contempt. * We repeat that this is a grave error-and it is one, which carries its own punishment with it. The loss is all our own. We close our hearts against many a stream of pleasure, which would, were it suffered to have its way, diffuse itself benignantly over our souls and make us at once happier and wiser. We may be disappointed at the outset of our career by the external aspects of Indian life. We miss much of the luxury and magnificence; the oriental gilding which our youth had been led to anticipate; but manhood may find brighter joys than these, in all that surrounds it. The man who feels himself from first to last, a wretched exile; whose life is one of discontent, ever hankering after change; who looks upon India as a country in which he is condemned, so many years, to suffer, and from which it is the main object of his existence to escape; is a self-tormentor, who may feel assured that he is wretched, only because he has not done his duty. The environments of Indian life properly regarded are capable of affording a constant succession of pleasures to the most enthusiastic and ardent temperaments. India, indeed, presents a noble field for every degree and Some of the illustrated London periodicals have lately published engravings of the interior of the grand conservatory at Chatsworth which very closely resembles a snatch of an Indian jungle. We have seen, in India, people in ecstasies over some of the beautiful wood-cuts in the illustrated edition of the Chaumiere Indienne, who could not be persuaded to admire the originals-who would not indeed stop a moment to look at them. And yet every where may Indian cottages be seen as picturesque as those which the artists have copied or imagined. |