for all the sins you have in these letters committed against truth and reason, were you compelled to live in that " charming town" during one hot season, that you might speak from personal experience, of the luxury supposed to reign there, or set a better example to those shameful rioters who are, you say, sunk in the grossest sensuality! In fact, it is quite obvious, that here also, as on other occasions, our Captain has naturally enough drawn his opinion of Calcutta society, from the manners of the inferior class, to which alone he has had free access; none but those whose local knowledge is great, can picture to themselves any thing worse in debauchery than what are termed the Bim Bussor, or festive recreations, supported by the captains and mates of the inferior trading-vessels, and which are as opposite to the dissipation of the higher classes as darkness to light, or the literary productions of Captain Deville to those of our historian, Mill.` In such society, and amid such scenes, has this Gallic skipper acquired that knowledge of the English in India, which he now brings forth to enlighten his countrymen, in other words, to foster their vanity and increase their distrust of those, among whom the lowest would, we trust, prove superior to him in describing honestly a foreign settlement. Nay, he makes us out to be the meanest of cowards in war too, for he affirms that we thrust the Sepoys into the front of danger, and afterwards wear the laurels we thus compel them to gain for us! This is one of those innumerable assertions the falsehood of which it would be endless to expose; but all who know anything of military etiquette in India are aware, that it is European soldiers, and not the Sepoys, (when they are present at all,) who are made to stand "the first shock of the battle against the Mahrattas and Birmans." The passage affords a good specimen, however, of his usual mode of deciding. To this we shall add a few lines, exemplifying his custom of interlarding French with English words, and giving another proof of his impartial accuracy. Of the "haute société," we are told, that they go frequently to Fort William, to hear the band playing in the evening

"Pour y entendre une musique toute militaire, et cela avec un silence et un sang-froid imperturbable, qui est cependant troublé assez souvent par des gentlemen, qu'un genre d'excès particulier aux Anglais fait tomber de leurs voitures, ou porte à injurier des froides et paisibles ladies, qui étalent leur insouciance dans d'elegans landaux."

He pourtrays the English "gentlemen" of Calcutta, not only as cold, proud, reserved, and apathetic, but intensely cruel, and obstinately unjust; so that the French beauties who may happen to read his book must of course look upon them as the most odious and frightful race under the sun; and they will execrate them outright when they are told by Mons. le Capitaine, that their wives are treated as altogether secondary beings, and that

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less attention is paid to the ladies than to the horses and dogs of these universal tyrants. As even a French trader must be philosophically moral, he proceeds to inform Florine, that the illassorted marriages are in India one great cause of the degradation of women, and that as the English there either choose their wives from among the "country-born," (we take his own word,) or among ill-bred girls who come out from Britain to market, it is impossible the case should be otherwise than what he is pleased to assert it is. Now it so happens, that in the "haute société" there is not one gentleman in twenty married to a "countryborn," and that in no country of the world is more devoted attention paid to the sex of Florine, or marriages on the whole better assorted or happier than in India; but the Captain having found his associates chiefly among classes where the "country-born abound, the sources of his rash conclusion on this point are sufficiently obvious. Of the native women, he tells his Adorable, that they not only put rings in their ears and noses, but also through the under lip-another of those comical facts which Captain Deville has been the first not only to discover, but also to promulgate. Thus he rambles on from one extravagance to another, rendering his ignorance more and more obvious the more he endeavours to set forth his acquirements. It was to be expected that before dismissing the native females, he would, were it only to please Florine, dwell upon and lament the slavish lives which their husbands or seducers compel them to lead; besides, these lamentations are so common and threadbare, that it would be surprizing if they escaped the repetition of a writer, wanting in even the originality of Munchausen. We may notice one fact by the way, which it is the more requisite to mention here, as many sensible writers have overlooked the circumstance, viz. that there is no female race in the world who have less bodily labour to undergo than even the poorest of that sex in India: they have of course the domestic business to attend to,—to prepare the food, to clean the utensils, to bring water, and sweep the house; but not only is the aggregate of that duty infinitely less than what the wife of an English labourer has to perform, or a servant of all work in an English family, but each particular act is infinitely less fatiguing than the corresponding act with us. To prepare a native's dinner, for example, requires far less exertion than to dress an Englishman's; and to keep a floor clean in a hut consisting of one apartment, and that not many feet square, is much less trouble than to preserve a cottage of several rooms in order; while to walk a mile or more to milk several cows is ten times more laborious than to go a few yards to bring home a pitcher of water: in a word, the Englishwoman has on hand at least three times the work of her Indian representative, and nothing

can be more unfounded than the lamentations made about the severe drudgery imposed on the latter.

From page 73 to 75 there is a tirade (about the tenth specimen since we began to read) on the horrible cruelties of the English. "I demand it of you, false philanthropists, enslavers and oppressors, are these men happy and free? I put the question to you, Britons, who have declared that you cannot endure slavery in the world? Alas! if the Indian could make himself be understood, how he would develope to the world your perfidy, and how would the deplorable state to which you have reduced him prove cloquent to the eyes of the nations who still confide in your deceptive policy!"

We shall transcribe no more, but if any of our readers will turn to the passage, it will amuse them, and give some idea of the great loss Florine sustained, in not living long enough to peruse the sagacious observations of her acute intended. Returning to matter of fact, the governor-general, he informs us, nominates all the military candidates; but those for the civil service are commissioned by the Court of Directors, which former portion of intelligence being till now unheard-of in England, probably was so among the author's countrymen, who at all events cannot complain that he has told them nothing new. Alluding to the burial ground, he asserts that the Calcutta residents, following their morose and saturnine humour, are partial to walking there, though there is neither room nor inclination to do so. Then he moralizes profoundly on the circumstance of the theatre (“ salle de spectacle") being in the neighbourhood of the cemetery, and states that, even at the playhouse, the coldness and phlegm of the people banish all pleasure, under whatever form it presents itself; that acting is there a mere burlesque, and all the performances are taken from the English stage. For our author's satisfaction, they should certainly have got up a French tragedy or vaudeville!

At p. 149, however, there is a narrative which, as far as our recollection goes, is, for barefaced effrontery, unparalleled. He asserts, that while proceeding through the town in his palanquin, he came to a pagoda surrounded with palm-trees, where he saw a concourse of natives assembled, who seemed in great agitation; the tumult increased; he approached, and a horrible spectacle presented itself. The Brahmins were massacring the poor Pariahs whom hunger had driven to that place! The victims, he says, kneeled, imploring vainly for mercy; their voice was unheard, and in an instant they were all slaughtered, and their yet palpitating carcasses received in proof of contempt new and frightful mutilations. Finally, the crowd fell with their faces on the earth, and the priests, raising to Heaven their blood-stained hands, “offered to Brahma the abominable sacrifice which they had consummated to his honour." Now this transaction must have happened, by what

we can gather from the preface, (for the letters are without dates,) between the years 1820 and 1822, and in the very heart of Calcutta, with impunity to the perpetrators of the horrible outrage. This alone, we think, affords a sufficient contradiction of the whole story, though possibly built on some petty disturbance. But what shall we say of his declaration just quoted, that when the slaughter was finished, the priests made an offering to Brahma of the bloody sacrifice, a species of homage which, as every schoolboy knows, never could have been paid by any worshipper of that Divinity? Of a like unfounded, though less shocking, description, is a recital supposed to have been made by a Scotch officer of rank, at the hotel of Fultah, (a spot between Calcutta and Kedgeree,) of the manner in which the Mysore princes are confined, the alleged cruelty of which makes us smile at the impotent malice of the Captain, and admire the ingenuity with which he tells his tale from the viva voce relation of the officer once actually in charge of the princes, whom he represents as having been dismissed the service for having in some degree mitigated the rigour of their confinement!

To conclude a review which we have made a great deal longer than we intended at the outset, but in which we have not noticed a twentieth part of the more than absurdities with which the book abounds, we shall only add, that at Fultah, M. Deville meets also with an old Brahmin who relates to him the tragic story of his life, the misery of which hinges on the Brahmin having been unfortunate in love! The heroine's name is "Nalvira," (though no woman of the Brahmin caste could ever be so called,) and a Nabob, that is, a Mussulman, falls in love with her, and insists on taking her from the hero, whose name (hear this, Oriental scholars!) is " Abdallah!" At last, as the Nabob is about to marry the Brahminee, and Brahmin priests are celebrating the marriage between her and the Mussulman, the ceremony is interrupted at the critical moment by the hero" Abdallah;" and on an exposure being made of the Nabob's wickedness, the chief Brahmin orders him to expiate his crime by a pilgrimage to Juggernaut! Was there ever before such a farrago of absolute nonsense! If the King of England were to marry a ploughman's daughter, or the Archbishop of Canterbury to officiate at the altar of the Spanish chapel, Manchester-square, it would be nothing in comparison with this, nor would any one but the most determined and unblushing Munchausen have given such a narrative to this world as truth. It may seem strange that we should have said so much of this volume, or treated it in any other strain than that of mere irony throughout; but it is yet more inexplicably strange that it should ever have been, in any quarter, foreign or domestic, quoted and referred to for correct intelligence.

ART. V.-Tragedie de Alessandro Manzoni Milanese. Il Conte di Carmagnuola e l' Adelchi. Aggiuntevi le Poesie varie dello Stesso, ed alcune prose sulla scoria del Dramma Tragico. Firenze. Presso Giuseppe Molini, 1825. 12mo.

THE cause of the apparent riches and real poverty of the Italian drama, down to the period of Alfieri, has always been among those problems in literary history which it is difficult to explain upon any theoretical principle. Gifted with the most acute and attic perception of the beautiful, endowed with the strongest passions, encircled with the sublimities and graces both of nature and Art, living in a land affording equal exercise for memory and for hope, with annals rich in evil and good, in battle, and faction, and conspiracy, in splendid exhibitions of virtue, and in dark and appalling catastrophes and crimes, the Italians seem of all nations the people among whom the drama was likely to have received its most energetic developement and its fullest perfection. And yet out of the long file of dramas which, from Trissino down to Alfieri, have enjoyed a momentary and insulated popularity, what one has ever become incorporated with the literature of Italy,—a familiar and popular inheritance as Shakspeare's are to England, or those of Schiller and Goethe to Germany?

"The cause of this defect," which is admitted by the Italians themselves, it is by no means our intention, in the present article, to investigate, though we are certainly inclined to think that the source of the deficiency lies deeper than in those external causes to which it has been attributed; and is to be found rather in certain peculiarities of the national mind, than in those more accidental and variable contingencies with which it has been associated by the Italians themselves. One cause, at least, to which the coldness and mediocrity of the Italian tragic drama has been mainly ascribed, namely, their neglect of modern and national materials, and their predilection for mythological and classical subjects, we are sure has been very highly overrated. For, besides that the example of other countries shows that, in subjects of this nature, the whole range and compass of the dramatic energy may be successfully exerted, it is really not true that subjects of a modern kind have been neglected by the Italians. They have had a fair trial, and down to the present time with an almost total want of success. Without adverting to the crowd of names of minor rank, the Rosmundas of Ruccellai, Cavallerino, and Alfieri, the Adriano of Luigi Groto, the Tragedies of Curtio, almost all of them founded on modern subjects, the Torrismondo of the great Tasso, the repeated attempts to dramatise the Guiscardo.