far too high-minded for such vulgar disquietudes, and she had little in common with the minds which they agitate. Her fine frame and generous heart had been overmastered by feelings of another kind; and she was universally deemed a martyr to disappointed hopes of marriage, when those hopes were the most abhorrent from her nature. She was fascinating and instructive, even whilst she was sinking into the grave, and her wonted smile lingered on her face in death. A memorial was rudely sculptured on her grave-stone, at the expense of one who knew her well. It was borrowed from the pathetic epitaph of Shenstone on Maria, and ran thus: Vale, vale, Isabella! Quam melius est tui meminisse, But this is a melancholy theme. Yet, spite of every wish and every effort to change the strain, I find the thing impossible, and the chord being once touched, I must go on. Recollections, "sicklied o'er with the same pale cast," continue to haunt me, strive as much as I will to oppose or divert their current. And thus it must ever be, so long as this orb of sorrow revolves on its axis, that he who unclasps the volume of his life, will start with horror at the sad and painful world of remem brances he evokes from their graves. Thoughts are awakened, whether of yourself or of others, that, as they rush with hideous yell from the cells of memory, tear and agitate you like furies. The English society, into which you are thrown whilst in India, becomes after a few years a gallery of dismal portraits, out of whose histories the tragic muse might weave many a mournful drama of real woe; and he who can meditate with a heart at ease upon the manifold chronicles registered in his mind, of vanished hopes, of disappointed ambition, of friendships passed away, of early loves buried in sudden clouds, or thrown prostrate by overwhelming storms, and can calmly pick up the links of the broken chain without grief and shuddering, is a being belonging to another nature, with whom we have nothing in common beyond the form and configuration of humanity. Amongst the specific train of causes, however, by which these unhappy results have for the most part been brought about, and which the careful observer of society and manners will not fail to have noted down minutely,— he cannot overlook, as he unfolds his tablets, the havoc, disorder, and wretchedness, superinduced in Anglo-Indian life over the other ills to which we are heirs, by the mania for ostentatious expense, which is the most fatal epidemic, whether of the country or the climate. It pervades all orders and classes, and drives on young and old indiscriminately to their ruin. Strange, indeed, it must seem, and it is an anomaly that baffles all set reasoning, that, execrating the climate as everybody does from morning to night, -panting beneath the hot fumes of the land-winds, which it would be no poetic exaggeration to term "blasts from hell,"-punctured from top to toe with the prickly heat, a sensation that teaches you, without any help from the fancy, precisely what you would feel were your body stretched on a bed of upraised pins,-awakened in the sultry stillness of the night-watches out of some delightful dream of England and of home by musquitoes buzzing in the ear, or meeting each other by appointment on the tip of the nose, cursing in querulous anguish the dull sameness and unvaried vapidness of existence,-compelled every returning eve to take the self-same ride or drive along the self-same road, through the same monotonous vista of trees,-to meet for ever the same faces, and reciprocate the same cold and unheartfelt greetings,—and when the nightly promenade is concluded, to sit down without appetite to the same bill of fare, of which that of to-day is the exact fac-simile of that of yesterday, the eternal pig with the lime in his mouth, the unfailing mulligatawney, the never ending rice and curry, with the same oft-repeated topics, bad puns, and tasteless reflections ;-that, enduring these incommodities, and whilst every one is beating his wings against the bars and wires of his cage, from which, in due course of time, a little worldly prudence would have delivered him;-that, all this while, nearly the whole AngloIndian world should be busied in schemes of throwing away the means which can alone ferry them back again to the land of their fathers, is, I repeat, a most perplexing paradox. But so it is. The climate, it is true, renders many things, which elsewhere would be termed luxuries, absolute necessaries. Horses, carriages, servants, unavoidably multitudinous from the endless divisions and subdivisions of employment, palanquins, garden-houses,-all, or some of these, are perhaps requisite to mitigate the inconveniences of a clime which forbids bodily exertion. But it is not merely the indulgences, without which nature would sicken and languish, Quêis humana sibi doleat natura negatis ; it is not in these that European fortunes are engulphed and lost. There are other "Serbonian bogs," in which gold mohurs and rupees sink as fast, often faster, than they are obtained. There are horse-racings, horse-breedings, horse-trainings, equipages ostentatiously swelled beyond every domestic need, carriages gorgeously splendid, postillions and even horse-keepers extravagantly liveried, and tables, on which a very few simple condiments would represent all the actual comforts of the whole bazaar, not only crammed with a superfluous heap of provisions, but glittering with a costly shew of plate, gold and silver. Add to this, that your capricious and pompous civilian, or your brief-proud lawyer, whose fees in Westminster-hall could not keep his washerwoman in good humour, but which in India have descended upon him in showers, cannot content himself with a mansion of modest proportions. No: he must roam through long suites of elegantly furnished apartments. He erects, therefore, a palace, which, as it rises out of the earth like an exhalation, so it often disappears like an exhalation; -for the sun and the monsoons, with their united strength, are rapid artificers of ruin, and these being helped in their work of destruction by the puny industry of their active collaborateur, the white ant, in a few very short years, the master-pieces of domestic architecture crumble to their foundations. Yet to rear these transitory emblems of human |