new and remote country, the severed chain of the affections they had left at home. Long will the tradition of these men flourish at Madras. The era when these cordial intercourses smiled upon us, comprises the governments of Lord Clive and of Lord William Bentinck. It was, however, a deceitful calm. A storm was brooding over us, which, in social havoc and desolation, was not exceeded by the wildest elemental fury in the natural world. It threw down the hopes, the friendships, the comforts of our little society. Such was our condition, when Lord William Bentinck's successor arrived from Bengal to plague us. "The fiend blew mildew from his shrivell'd lips." Let Philosophy say what she pleases, the patience with which we bear our ills depends much upon the dignity or worthlessness of the agent that inflicts them. Let the evil be administered by an ignoble hand, the sense of suffering rises to phrensy. And Shakspeare was right (was he ever wrong?) in making the spurns of the unworthy the highest in his climax of adversities. In the visitation that fell upon Madras in 1809, the gloomy solace of its coming from high station and elevated rank was wanting. The author of the mischief was a little, phlegmatical, cold-blooded civil servant from Calcutta-the mere creature of the desk and the office-a clerk with a pen in his ear;-yet, such is the genius of the Indian governments, he could wield that pen to blight the hopes of youth, and to destroy the repose of age. The events of that troubled period ought surely to read the Company, or whomsoever hereafter the destinies of India may be confided to, an awful warning against vesting in a servant a rule over servants. Subserviency is but an indifferent school for authority. Upon his first arrival, the man entangled himself in the intrigues of a pitiful faction, who had tried, without success, the same experiment upon the lofty mind of Lord William. Into the bosom of the new Governor they infused all their suspicions and their enmities, where they shot up instantly as in a congenial soil. Thus the hoarded spleens of a contemptible party gathered in a black vapour around him. He breathed no other atmosphere. He became their tool and accomplice, and sent forth his proscriptions at their bidding.

It may offend the fastidiousness of some feelings to rake up the disgraceful proceedings of this guilty period : but let it be remembered, that there never has yet been an abuse of power in India either visited on the head of its author, or redressed in the person of its victim. It is to public opinion only that there lies any thing at all like an effective appeal. It is the only responsibility which can reach those who make their power the instrument of their passions.

The story of those times is not to be told briefly. It is enough to remark, that B- did his work with despatch. In less than three months of obstinate and self-willed authority, he continued to incur the impartial execrations of all sorts of persons. The army in mutinyexperienced officers, grey in loyalty and in arms, driven almost to rebellion-the whole civil service, with a few paltry exceptions, united in one society of resentment against him. You may judge, then, how a little mind, bloated with its brief authority, could disturb our comfort. Our parties, it is true, met as usual; the same plenty covered our tables; but social enjoyment was extinguished. Fee'd servants stood behind your chair. The sanctity of your home was not free from a

The

merciless inquisition. Every man suspected his neighbour. slightest stricture upon the measures of the local Government was reported with the usual exaggerations of verbal transmission. If it was a civilian from whom the obnoxious remark had escaped, he was removed from his situation, and appointed to a less lucrative one at a distance from the Presidency, and probably an unhealthy station. There was no appeal from the sentence. The Governor, secure in the remoteness of the colony from the authorities in England, calculating also upon their natural leaning to his representations, revelled at will in proscriptions and destitutions of all kinds. No pen can delineate the almost death-like face of society at this period. It was all alarm and consternation. No man knew whose turn was coming. It was a proscription, indeed, not written in blood; but the order that deprived a civilian of his office, was a sentence of death to him; it took away the means wherewith he lived. Poor Roebuck! It would have been merciful, even had he offended, to have suffered him to descend in peace to his grave, at a place where the habits and affections of his life had taken root. Adverse circumstances had prevented him from accumulating property sufficient to enable him to retire from the service; but he held a good post, which he filled most creditably, (I believe at the Revenue Board,) and abandoning all hopes of England, he found abundant satisfaction in contributing to the hospitalities of Madras, where he had resided nearly half a century; for he was about seventy, when he was ordered to resign, and appointed to a distant collectorship in a noxious country, and with a slender salary. The stroke of the poniard would have been benevolence compared with this cruelty. Never shall I forget the last parting look of the old man, as he took his adieux of us. It was a mild presage of what was to happen, and it told us most significantly, that we should see him no more. He did not long survive. That sure, but unseen malady, a broken heart, soon did its work, and relieved him from the oppression and the oppressor. What had Roebuck done? In the problem of persecution the offence is often the most inexplicable part of it. Roebuck, when he was a member of a mercantile house, had speculated largely in Nabobs' bonds, which were securities given by those personages for sums they had borrowed. The assumption of their territory by the Company rendered them unable to discharge them; and an Act of Parliament passed to relieve the creditors by appropriating part of the Carnatic revenue to the payment of them. Upon the passing of this act, spurious bonds to an immense amount were proffered, as bona fide instruments, to the Commissioners, to whom the adjudication of all claims was referred. Of course, all who had legitimate claims, had an obvious interest to oppose and invalidate the false ones; the fund set apart for the payment of the whole debt being limited in its amount. There was a native of the name of Reddy Row, a Brahmin, who was suspected (and subsequently convicted) of having fabricated and sold a great number of these instruments. Several individuals of the Governor's party having entered deeply into the purchases of the securities which this man brought into the market, B-, in an evil hour, was persuaded to throw his protection over him, and to screen him, if possible, from justice. The Advocate-general was ordered to defend him, and, upon his conviction, the Madras Government obtained a pardon for him in

England. The criminal prosecution, therefore, of this delinquent, which Roebuck, conjointly with other persons, had set on foot, was a mortal offence to that stupid government. How short-sighted is oppression! Before the pardon arrived in India, Reddy Row was detected, upon the clearest proofs, of other forgeries by the Commissioners themselves. The man, finding all his villainies discovered, destroyed himself, and all the bonds which he had disposed of, (these for disputing which poor Roebuck had been so shamefully persecuted amongst the rest,) were wholly struck off and disallowed. The ground upon which the Governor applied for the pardon, was the alleged factious spirit of the prosecutors, and of the jury, who had wilfully, he said, defied the government, and combined in an open resistance to its authority. Such was the unheard-of nonsense that was sent to England upon that memorable occasion, and, strange to say, infused into the Royal ear by his advisers, in order to set aside the solemn verdict of a jury, and to let loose upon society a felon of the worst description.

It is an old transaction, it is true; but it ought, nevertheless, to be called from its slumbers to bear witness to the thorough heartlessness and cold malignity of poor Roebuck's persecution.

It is difficult to imagine more infatuated stupidity than that of the Madras Government at this period, nor could any thing more decidedly show how completely distance from England estranges us from her institutions. They went so far as to set up a profane gabble against the trial by jury itself, as unfit for India without certain modifications. What the trial by jury would become, when modified by such hands, it is easy to conjecture. The specific constitution also of the juries who tried Reddy Row and his accomplices, was the subject of the most indecent cavil; and their names and characters were held up to contempt and ridicule. Had the verdict, solemnly pronounced under the awful sanction of an oath, and thus shamefully criticised, been in conformity to their wishes, that noble institution would have been the subject of their foolish panegyric. The fact is, there was never assembled a more respectable or intelligent set of men, all of them selected from a class of life much superior to that from which they are selected at home, to decide on life or property. Nor did the Grand Jury, who found the bills, escape censure; some individuals among them did not escape punishment. They were chiefly civilians high in the service, merchants, and bankers. Of the civilians, three were removed from their situations, and appointed, with a considerable loss of salary, to other stations. No charge was specified-the only inference was, that they had given offence by concurring in finding the bills against the criminal, over whom the Governor had thrown the ægis of his protection. not singular (Lord Melville was then at the head of the India Board) that these calumnies against the Madras juries, because their duties, the most high and responsible that can be exercised in civil life, happened to clash with the insane measures of a self-willed creature, clothed with a delegated authority,-is it not strange that such calumnies should have found credit in England? They had their effect, however, for a season, till subsequent events threw back the disgrace and infamy upon those who had earned it. Is it fitting that these things should be forgotten? If they are not preserved as lessons against oppression, they will be resorted to as precedents in its favour. Lord

Is it

of

Charles Somerset, at the Cape, was a servile plagiarist from many the acts of the Madras Governor, because those acts remained unpunished. Had they received the animadversion due to them, would the Governor of the Cape, (the revolting character of whose administration has been forcibly traced in former numbers of this Magazine,) have been guilty of such barefaced imitations of their genius and spirit? Starlings should be trained to cry them in the ears of all Colonial gover

nors.

It is a remarkable fact, that the Jury which gave all this offence to B, by delivering a verdict according to their consciences, had, in a case immediately preceding Reddy Row's trial, received the commendation of the Chief-Justice for their accurate moral penetration and minute analysis of evidence, in a question affecting the life of an innocent man charged with murder. As it is an awful instance of alternation in human affairs, and of the providential detection of a most atrocious conspiracy, it may be worth while shortly to relate it.

A most savage murder had been committed upon a serjeant in the Madras European regiment, then stationed at Masulipatam. A corporal and his wife gave information against one Hawley, a private in the same regiment. They stated themselves to have been eye-witnesses of the transaction, which took place, they said, at a short distance from the cantonment; that Hawley, who had apparently been lying in wait for his victim, ran towards him on his approach, stabbed him with a bayonet, and then disappeared. They added, that, with a view to obtain medical assistance, they had removed the body to their own hut. On this information, Hawley was sent down to the Supreme Court at Madras, and, on the trial, both the man and the woman persisted in their story, swearing positively to every particular. There was nothing to contradict their testimony but the prisoner's assertion of his own innocence, coupled with his solemn asseveration that the murder was committed by the man and the woman in their own hut; that he was present, and saw the man (some quarrel having arisen) stab the serjeant with a bayonet; that he (the prisoner) would have rushed out, but was forcibly detained by both parties. In this interval they endeavoured to induce him, by the offer of money, to hush up the matter; but, finding him inexorable, the woman ran to the Colonel and lodged her information, whilst the man detained him at the point of the bayonet. As the defence, however, rested on no positive evidence, and the depositions of the man and his wife were uncontradicted, the Chief-Justice charged the jury to that effect, and, when they retired, a verdict of guilty was universally expected. But the manner in which the corporal had given his evidence, some contradictions in minor circumstances, and his mode of answering the questions put to him on cross-examination, had been watched with an acute but silent comment by two or three intelligent men on the jury. Whilst they were deliberating, it happened almost miraculously that one or two important facts, which had been suppressed on the trial, had come to the knowledge of a magistrate; and as they tended to the exculpation of the prisoner, and to throw the guilt upon the two witnesses, he committed them both upon suspicion. At the time when they were taken into custody, the jury, entertaining doubts which they could not satisfy, acquitted Hawley. In a few minutes, the committal of the witnesses as the actual perpetrators of the

deed, was made known to the Court. A bill was found against them by the Grand-Jury, and they were, in a few hours afterwards, tried and convicted by another jury; Hawley giving a clear and consistent account of the murder, in which he was confirmed by witnesses who had been kept back on the former trial. In forty-eight hours from the time of their appearing to give testimony against Hawley, the two wretches were executed. Such was the jury publicly libelled by the Madras Government in their despatches to England.

Cecil Smith did not escape the persecution of those times. His of fence is a mystery to this hour. He said nothing; but it was suspected what his opinions were, though lying undivulged in his bosom. There was no accusation-there could be none. He was ordered to quit his office of Accountant-General, which he had long filled, and in which his mind had been long exercised; for he had grown up to it, and acquired by that long discipline a peculiar expertness in the intricate financial duties that belonged to it. He was ordered to take charge of a judicial station up the country, an office quite new to him-to begin his apprenticeship, and to try his hand on matters of life and property, a raw, inexperienced Tyro of fifty. Mr. Maitland, the magistrate who committed Reddy Row, and whose affairs were involved to a large amount in a great commercial house, and Mr. Thomas Parry, a partner of another respectable firm, were ordered, at a few days' notice, to England. These proscriptions so rapidly succeeding each other broke up our Madras society, and it has not recovered the shock to this day. As for Cecil Smith, he was the life of our circles, the active promoter of their hilarity, a most bustling extra-official master of the ceremonies, outdoing that important functionary in his indefatigable zeal to make every soul happy. He was like a Savoyard's instrument, always in tune to mirth and pleasantry. Cecil carried home his complaint to England, but the usual policy brooded over the councils of the Directors. They could find no blame in the conduct of their servant;-they endeavoured to reconcile the conduct of the local Government to some supposed faction against its authority; but they found only diffused dislike, festering into hatred-not loud, but deep, and gathering strength every hour from compression. The common result of matters managed by those who are afraid to do justice, and shrink from barefaced wrong-nothing was done, and the grievance was unredressed. Cecil carried back a wounded spirit to Madras, where he died a few weeks after his arrival. His loss was much deplored in that place, and the evening murmurs of his hookah long missed in its convivial parties. Such was the miserable condition of Madras. The author of it all was a pale, sallow, official gentleman, with the mien and the soul of a clerk; grave and taciturn, as if he had forgot himself and all his human feelings into marble-no smile ever visited his lips; if it did, it was like that of Ovid's amiable being

"Risus abest, nisi quem visi movêre dolores."

To describe Charley Wynox efficiently, there must be a new language, certainly, a new set of epithets. String and compound all that are now in use as you will, it will not do. Who can describe the varied deformities of that unearthly countenance, yet all conspiring to the strangest effect the countenance of man can produce? Those eyes,