ed by the revival of Greek! It seems to us that the difficulties which beset the first pioneers in the language, partly caused by the jealous care with which the Hindus prevented any acquisition of the sacred tongue by the profane, and partly inherent in the necessity of deciphering and arranging in connected order chronicles of false or no chronology, have inspired the few by whose learned sagacity and unwearied diligence they have been surmounted, with too great admiration for the spoils. They have vanquished-all honour to them!-the dragon-guards of this garden of the Hesperides, and the fruit they have thus hardly won, they declare golden. In short, we are almost rash enough to fancy that the merits of Sanskrit have been over-rated.

Mrs. Speir's glasses are of the most roseate tinge: all that is beautiful in the picture is brought conspicuously forward, all that is base or uncomely carefully concealed. The sublime asceticism of the Brahman is again and again portrayed; his selfish and unnatural tyranny slurred over; the love passages of Krishna among the shepherd-girls are redolent of flowers and sentiment; their disgusting obscenity utterly ignored. And yet our feeling is rather that of a person who tastes something which demands an acquired taste to be enjoyed :-"Yes, it is very nice, but not any more, thank you." We like not this oriental sherbet : give us our old wine-draught from "the glory that was Greece, and the grandeur that was Rome!"

It has been asserted that the Greek pantheon was, in its origin, identical with the several objects of Aryan worship; but still the type which the Greek mind impressed upon their mythology brings it into almost polar opposition with the spirit of Hindu religion. Among the latter their gods and their worship are the first thing, the second thing, and the third thing. All their writings, with hardly an exception, have a religious aim in view; even their comedies begin with an introductory prayer; and their supreme class is the pontifical. Whereas of all nations, perhaps the enlightened Greeks have been by far the most irreligious. Even in their old days of more fervent superstition, there is less adoration visible than that sort of kindred sympathy that might be naturally felt by heroes, poets, lovers, and hunters towards beings who in another and more beautiful world were agitated among themselves with like passions and desires, and could therefore feel an interest in, and, as far as their limited power permitted, assist their mortal devotees, each in their respective sphere. And when we come to later times, we find philosophy, through her immortal interpreters, calmly dropping these gods

that are no gods into the place of poetry's pretty bantlings. Comedy, to be sure, in the shape of Aristophanes, takes up the cudgels in defence of Olympus; but this is done, not from a feeling of dutiful devotion, or of even common respect towards its inhabitants it is merely the expression of a conservative desire of a return to the good, honest, old times when men had something to swear by.

Thus the Greek gods altogether take such much lower ground in history, that as the poetic incarnations of certain acts, pursuits, or feelings, they have not only bravely held their own for many a day, but by the succeeding poets, painters, and sculptors of every land, have been decked by so many an additional charm and splendour, as to have become the old familiar friends whom we are ever glad to recognise, honour, and believe in at a moment's notice.

The Hindu deities, on the other hand, form the pervading life and soul of all Hindu chronicles: theirs the adventures which each history records; their glorification the aim of every page, sentence, and syllable. In fact Hinduism is an attempted theocracy. We therefore look for something more than usually admirable in the character of the gods of such astounding influence. Atlas must be worthy of the universe which he supports. On first inspection we are startled into the most extravagant admiration; and we allow that the gods are fully worthy of their position. But, as we read, we find in their theology such frequent slips occurring from the heights of sublimity to the bathos of childish absurdities, that we bethink ourselves of applying the only true tests how far any pagan worship is laudable. Are the works and offices ascribed to these deities of an elevated character? Are the services with which they may be well pleased fairly rational and meritorious? Does the religious system work well towards general morality? For the first of these questions we learn that the blessings chiefly prayed for are of a temporal and personal description, selfish and often puerile petitions; that the object and scope of the divine avatars on earth are generally mean, ridiculous, or obscene; and that the Hindu account of the creation of the universe, the highest field that the human imagination could have had for the operations of the Deity, is as low-minded and gross a picture as any nation has ever conceived. With regard to the other two points we have seen that the Hindu laws pay just so much attention to morality as the exigencies of human nature force upon society; and that the sacred duties are made to consist in a perpetual routine of frivolous observances. The same spirit

of flattery that elicited from them sounding titles for their gods, prompted the constant and formal performance of courtier-like duties upon the divine king. Wretched ceremonies and cruel self-torture, the car of Juganath and the widow's funeral pile, are the natural adjuncts of this malignant worship.

"Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum."

Finally, we may add that as for their boasted theory of immortality, their utmost hopes were that after a series of transmigration through almost every form of matter, they might eventually in some lucky shape of metempsychosis chance to lead a life of such religious abstraction from the flesh, as to merit at last the vague and equivocal reward of absorption into the deity; their utmost ideas of future punishment consisted in the dread of a more numerous series of transmigrations, and those not in the most agreeable forms of existence.

Upon all these grounds, therefore, we have no help for it but to conclude that the Hindu conceptions of the nature of the Divinity are by no means correspondent to the frequently exalted language in which he is addressed. Even their monotheism into which their champions contend that the Vedas almost rise, appears only to have a verbal being. In fact the gods, even at that early age, are of decided plurality: the sun, the dawn, the clouds, and the winds have each their separate presiding spirit; and the language which talks of unity in God is simply that perfection of poor human adulation—and who so perfect a flatterer as your Hindu? -which, when it has exhausted all other titles and attributes, at last declares that, compared to the especial patron of its present worship, the other members of the mythology are mere nobodies, but that He of the moment is the one sole Power.

And we

Not to mince matters farther, Hindu worship, as all unrevealed religion must more or less be, is fantastic and odious. would passingly deprecate that misguided enthusiasm which, in its eagerness to find unreal similarities to the true worship, seeks to symbolise and refine a gross, barbaric, material mythology. We must take it, and make the best of it, in its naked ugliness, wherever we find it.

In the old Norse legends, Odin supreme, Thor with his mighty hammer, the Valkyries on their steeds, the fate-weaving Nornies, and all the grand old tenants of the Scandinavian Valhalla, bear about them the same humanity that we have already noticed in the spirit of Greek polytheism. Creature and creator are intimately blended, and there is so close an interfusion of ideas between 34

VOL. V.NO. II.

the human hero-land below and the divine hero-land above, that Odin, as we read, seems to have almost as palpable and real existence as any of his gallant Vikings themselves; just as it seems perfectly natural and proper that gods and men should meet in equal conflict before the walls of Troy, and that the sword of human Diomedes shall taste the divine blood of Aphrodite. Norse god or Greek god, both are alike human, intelligible, loveable, and, for the moment, even venerable. At least, if they are not our gods, they are our friends. But these Hindu powers seem to have put off humanity without putting on divinity. We cannot sympathise with them as men ; we cannot adore them as gods. Briefly, we dislike them from the first, and when we find that, not content with casually turning up in the historic page, they never quit it for a moment's retirement, this dislike extends naturally to the whole tenor of Hindu literature. There is much very good meat in the ragout, but we dislike the garlic, and garlic flavours the whole.

Let no one suppose that we at all venture to question the surpassing value of Sanskrit as a language for philological study; more especially in India, where such a knowledge is a practical key to every vernacular in the country. It is the intrinsic beauty of the literature which it contains that we misdoubt.

Perhaps a certain amount of this suspicion has its origin in the fact that when any one in this country flies from sweltering business to gasp a brief delight in books, he is fain to leave as completely behind him as he may, all thoughts of the burning sun and his dusky ininions, and to be borne fast and far into the cool fairy-land of Europe and of home. It may be that hereafter, when we have said good-bye for ever to this hot land and all its discomforts, and when the natives have become only a pleasant memory in the distance, we too, in imitation of Mrs. Speir, or the more illustrious Professor Wilson, may joy to re-people the haunted chambers of the past by poring over the sacred laws and holy legends of the race we once knew so well.

In England we can fancy that "Life in Ancient India" has been greeted with much attention and interest; it ought to be. read on winter nights, when the snow is on the ground and the wind howls round the house; but here in India itself the scenes it depicts are to an Anglo-Indian eye far more familiar than charming. Yet even here we have found pleasure in the agreeable instruction of Mrs. Speir; we only wish we had found her own enthusiasm on the subject more contagious.

265

ART. III-RISE OF THE NAVY AND ARMY AT BOMBAY. 1742-1760.

Debates in the House of Commons on the Mutiny Act for the East Indies. A. D. 1754. Hansard's Parliamentary History of England. Vol. XV.

IF, in looking over a portfolio, we were to set down an engraving from Froissart's volumes, and to turn up one of a modern artist, we should have a contrast somewhat similar to that offered by the naval and military establishments of Bombay in the course of ten years. We enjoy looking at representations of naval engagements or contending armies, in which very stiff warriors of size and weight, sufficient to sink their ships, aim mortal blows at each other; or knights and yeomen, shouting for England and St. George, make short work with the chivalry of France: we gain much information from these rude and grotesque pictures of the costumes, arms, and modes of fighting in use, when Europeans were slowly approaching that perfection in the art and appliances of war portrayed on the broad canvas of Horace Vernet. And with similar feelings of interest and curiosity, we have endeavoured to discover what the military and naval forces of Bombay really were, before reforms and improvements brought them to their present state of efficiency.

As 1742 was a year of peace, reductions, of which the Government had almost immediate cause to repent, were made both in the marine and military establishments. The East India Company have usually found their spasmodic efforts at economy expensive in the end, and this instance was not an exception. Officers, who had been many years in their service, were harshly dismissed; and although the local Government, feeling the great injustice and impolicy of thus turning adrift faithful men, deferred their execution of the Court's .orders until their victims' remonstrances could be referred home, the delay was only temporary, and the obduracy of their masters left them no alternative. The marine establishment as reduced, consisted of a superintendent, eight commanders, one of whom was styled commodore, three