was undertaken by Anstey, son of the celebrated author of the Bath Guide. Every body knows how rapidly the beard grows in a hot climate. Anstey's was of the blackest tint, and it being a warm season of the year, before the fourth act it had grown so long, as to render it actually necessary for Lady Macbeth to shave before she appeared in the fifth. It was, however, so sultry behind the scenes, and there was so little air in the room appropriated to dressing, that Anstey ordered a table with a looking-glass and his shaving apparatus to be placed on the stage, where there was a stronger current. In malicious pleasantry, some one rang the prompter's bell, which was the constant signal for drawing up the curtain. It was most promptly obeyed, and, to the amazement of the whole assembled fashion of Madras, Tom Anstey was exhibited in the costume of Lady Macbeth, in that most unfeminine part of his toilette. The roar, the screams of surprise and merriment, that ensued, are beyond description.

151

THE BENCH AND BAR OF INDIA.

I.

THE India-society writers have been most indefatigable in their descriptions of its peculiarities. After all, they give us only vague, shadowy, unembodied sketchings, much more to their own satisfaction than that of their readers. The silliness and affectation of English residents, whether at Calcutta and Madras, or Paris and Brussels, must always have as fatiguing a sameness in delineation as in real life. The scene only is changed; the persons of the drama remain unaltered. Whether a numerous society of English men and women, whose utmost horizon extends not beyond their own circle, whose little lives flutter in a narrow, circumscribed range of stupid visits, gaiety without mirth, ridicule without wit, finery without elegance, -be thrown together in Asia or in Europe, it is the same opaque, lifeless subject, alike uninteresting and uninstructive; a puppet-show of stiff, clumsy figures, playing at ladies and gentlemen.

In the mean while, of the natives of India, confessedly the most interesting race under the sun, we know nothing. We act for their amusement, not they for ours. They are the spectators-we the performers. We are condescending enough to exhibit for their entertainment all our pride, all our littleness, all our folly,—and it must be added, not a few of our vices. On the other hand, we are quite ignorant of the natives of Hindustan. We see forms and configurations of beings, totally unlike ourselves, moving to and fro; but we see them only as shadows through a curtain. "We

know nothing at all of them," said Sir John Shore, in 1792. "We neither converse, live, eat, or drink with them, and are in truth quite shut out from all knowledge of the Hindus," said Lord William Bentinck, in 1806. Have we penetrated further into the mystery by the aid of our new means and appliances? For, since that period, the nominal changes in our relations with them have been considerable. An affected equality, too affected to conceal the imposture, and such as, thirty years ago, was not dreamt of,-a troublesome, obtrusive disclaimer of old distinctions between native and European, but so awkwardly managed as to make the distinction more conspicuous and offensive than ever, is played off in the present improved state

of things by the Anglo-Indians of each presidency. "Amongst the gentlemen who honoured the meeting," says the daily paragraph, "were the Lord Bishop, the Honourable Chief Justice, Rajah Budinauth, Baboo Cassinauth Mullick, &c. &c., and other distinguished persons."

It is of yesterday, this flummery, this part and parcel of the cant of the age. Nor does it soften the real subjection; on the contrary, it draws the natives' attention to it by the awkwardness of the attempt to disguise it. A deep thinker (it was Tacitus) observes how the loss of liberty was aggravated, under the emperors, by retaining the nomina et vocabula of a free state. The natives of India, indeed, have long since seen through the ragged policy of this affected and nominal equality, and they remain as unmixed and as immiscible as before. It is said that the Corinthian brass was an entire metal, though a fusion of every other. A real political amalgamation, such as ought to subsist in India, would resemble Corinthian brass. But this forced, unnatural assimilation is the hammering and tinkering together a piece of lead to iron: there is no unity of substance. To wield a despotic influence over a vast race of mankind; to deprive them of actual independence, and then to throw them the husks and shells of complimentary phrases,

cannot, when duly considered, fail to embitter the servitude.

What inconsistencies startle them on all sides! Turn to the reports of intelligent Europeans for the moral characteristics of the Hindus. Perjury, fraud, falsehood, bribery, are declared to be their inveterate complexional habits. These are axioms assumed for the basis of every plan of jurisprudence that has yet been devised for India, amongst the numerous experiments of that kind which have been proposed or attempted. It is the runningbase of the celebrated Tenth Report of the House of Commons, in 1784. It is the burthen of Lord Teignmouth's canticle, in 1792. Upon this deeplaid foundation, this solid base of moral depression, assumed by every tyro of Indian policy as if it were another law of gravitation, our new schemes of Hindu legislation are fixed. The trial by jury, which supposes habits of truth and a love of justice in those serving as jurors, is at once imparted, without stint or restriction, to those, of whose vices collectors, magistrates, judges, have devoted half their time in furnishing inventories. What a leap! But with what growls of dissatisfaction was the gift imparted! Sir Charles Grey, the Calcutta chief justice, was frightened, in 1829, lest native juries should take it into their heads to determine the law