or the diamonds of an old one; to be able to say the best thing that is uttered; to sport a red ribbon or a Waterloo medal in their first novelty; to carry a point with a great man, or to borrow money from a rich one, may pass off an evening very well, with those who happen to be interested in such speculations; but, these things apart, the arrantest trifler in the circle must get weary at last, and be heartily rejoiced when the conclusion of the season spares him all farther reiteration of the mill-horse operation. It is this insipidity of society that forces so many of its members upon desperate adventures of gallantry, and upon deep play. Any thing, every thing is good to escape from the languor and listlessness of a converse from which whatever interests is banished. Many a woman loses her character, and many a man incurs a verdict for ruinous damages, in the simple search of that rarest of all rare things in society-a sensation. Neither is the matter much mended, if, barring the insipidity of bon-ton company, you plunge into the formal gravity of the middle classes, or into the noisy, empty mirth of the lower. The man of sense and feeling, wherever he goes, will find himself in a minority, in which few will speak his language or comprehend his ideas. He will seldom return to his home without a weary sense of the "stale, flat, and unprofitable" nothings he has been compelled to entertain in his intercourse with the world,-without the recollection of some outrage on his independence, some dogmatism that he dared not question, some impertinence that he dared not confute. With his ears ringing with blue-stocking literature, threadbare sophistries, forms erected into important principles, mediocrity elevated into consideration, and the preeminence of the vain, the ignorant, and the contemptible, he will shut himself up in his solitude, and say with the Englishman at Paris Je m'ennuis très bien ici. Against the recurrence of these annoyances, day after day renewed, what nerves can hold out? As life advances, time becomes precious, every moment is counted, every enjoyment is computed; and while the effort necessary for pleasing and being pleased becomes greater, the motive for making that exertion grows less. When the sources of physical gratification are dried up, and the illusions of life are dissipated, there remains nothing for enjoyment but a tranquil fireside, and the mastery of our own ideas and of our own habits in the privacy of home. But then, to enjoy these, you must not have a methodist wife, and you must have a porter who can lie with a good grace, a fellow who could say "not at home," though death himself knocked at the door. Neither should you read the newspapers, nor walk the streets. The times are long gone by since "wisdom cried out there." Folly, impertinence, sheer impertinence, has exclusive possession of the king's highway; and a dog with a tin-kettle at his tail has as good a chance as the wretch who dares to tread the pavement without partaking of the ruling insanity. Oh! Mr. Brougham, Mr. Brougham! your schoolmaster has a great deal yet to do: pray Heaven his rods and his fools' caps may hold out! M. July.-VOL. XXIII. NO. XCI. F THE SOLDIER'S BRIDE. YES, ye may pay your thoughtless duty, Oh! were her path the scene of brightness The fears her bosom once defied, Oft shall the smiles that bless'd the lover And when, perchance, War's stunning rattle What then avails the wreath of Glory? And shuns the mimic gleam of pleasure, To me, her flowery crown of gladness Her minstrel band-the dirge of death. M. A. SOCIETY IN INDIA, NO. IV. THE climate of India, which alarms us so much in England, loses nearly all its terrors when you arrive there. The valetudinaries, who are for ever taking up arms against it, and with the fear of diseased livers incessantly haunting them, and Buchan for their daily orderlybook, sacrifice themselves to the lean and sallow abstinence, in spite of the kindly intimations of Nature, that the hourly wastes of the machine demand hourly reparation,- are generally the first victims of a hot climate. Health in India may be won,-but do not woo her too assiduously. Woe to the ascetic, who attempts the Pythagorean system. As in other parts of the globe, she is best propitiated by a regimen not too indulgent nor too abstemious. The longer you diet with the gods, if spare fast is your theory, the sooner you will be diet for the worms, or rather for the Jackals, who in that country take precedency of the worms. It will fare still worse with you if you abstain from wine. The lifeless torpor of the spirits, the trembling languor of the frame, the appalling visitations of the foul hag Hysteria, with her wonted train of the very bluest devils,—that dreadful sinking at the heart, which neither poetry nor prose can describe-by these you will be convinced, and probably too late, of the foolishness of your doctrine. No. A few glasses of generous Madeira, a bottle, or more than a bottle, of Carbonel's fine hermitaged claret, or of the lighter growth from Adamson, "To life so friendly, and so cool to thirst,—" these are the few pleasing penalties you will have to pay for a tolerably vigorous existence in that country. As to the other nepenthe so highly esteemed there,-Hodgson's pale ale-he who can quaff it in safety must be a young military man, who is in the saddle from morn till night, or worked at morning and evening drills by some old kilndried lieutenant-colonel, who would rather renounce his Bible than his Dundas. To the bilious or the sedentary, to him who knows no exercise but the indolent agitation of the palanquin, a bottle of ale should be like that closed with the seal of Soliman. If he opens it without due warrant, a giant will arise out of it to destroy him. But at the period of which I am striving to collect a few memorials, now indeed somewhat in the rear-ward abyss of time,' Carbonel, and Paxton, and Adamson, and Hodgson, flowed most copiously at Madras. Then flourished George Keble, and Cecil Smith, the brother of Bobus, and old Ben Roebuck. They were all high in the civil service; and they devoted ungrudgingly no small portion of their liberal salaries to the social enjoyments of the place. No men in their generation, for it has passed away, took a greater delight in the diffusion of gaiety and goodhumour around them. There was a chair at their tables for the friendless cadet, or unintroduced ensign, whom they hospitably translated from the sordid hotels of the Black Town, half consumed by musquitoes and tavern-bills, to a plenteous board, and a snug bungalow in the compound. They gave them, moreover, good counsel, as well as good cheer; and all this with a kindness that almost repaired, in a * An enclosed garden. It 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. 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 merciless inquisition. Every man suspected his neighbour. The 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 |