of Buonaparte mania. The persons affected with this malady were to be seen, ruminating on the banks of the Ganges, the Nerbudda, and the Tumbudra, in the attitudes, and likewise aping all the little peculiarities, attributed to the great Emperor of the Western Hemisphere. If Napoleon took snuff in inordinate quantities, or rode hard, or affected to despise all the natural boundaries of kingdoms and states, faith, our public functionaries were not behind hand. They snuffed most outrageously, and rode their hobbies most unmercifully; indeed they soared far above all their predecessors in the adoption of the great Emperor's more enlightened system, which fell like a thunder-bolt upon every poor devil of a native, whether prince, nabob or jaghirdar, whose territory happened to be contiguous and to be of a productive nature. None were spared, save such as owned nothing but barren wastes, and even these last were converted into tributaries. The practice of this new school never varied; and a succession of treaties of perpetual peace and amity, which were invariably broken upon some pretence or other, and wars also undertaken to resist the encroachments of our more ambitious and troublesome neighbours (a capital idea), kept our frontier continually progressing on all sides; till at last the small red specks, which I had formerly noticed in the map of India to denote the British possessions, had become one uninterrupted blaze of red. Indeed the British flag, wherever it was permitted to wave over an embassy to a native court, seemed to possess the baneful influence attributed to the upas tree, by blighting and destroying every thing around it.

An amusing article might be written on the Gallo-phobia of the Wellesley and Minto dynasties. It was very much moderated by the successes of the "Sepoy General" in the Spanish Peninsula; but, up to the period of the commencement of the triumphs of Wellington, it seemed gradually to reach its culminating point. Two amusing instances of the feeling, with which Napoleon was regarded by the native and European inhabitants, are to be found in the letters of Claudius Buchanan. In 1806, he wrote-"I have just been conversing with the Brahmins of this celebrated pagoda (Seringham, near Trichinopoly), and they have been enquiring about Buonaparte. They have heard that, on his arrival, they are all to be made Christians." And in the following year he wrote "This society anxiously anticipates the confirmation of the report that Lord Wellesley has been appointed a Secretary of State. I believe it would be as agreeable to them, as to hear that Buonaparte has lost a leg-which is also reported." In the official minutes of the early part of Lord Minto's administration, the coming of the French was spoken of as an event, the only question regarding which was a question of time. The great hero of the "new school," the practices of which are really not much exaggerated in the above passage, was John Malcolm, who went a-head even too fast for Lord Wellesley, and utterly astounded the sober understandings of such men as Jonathan Duncan, Sir George Barlow, and Lord Cornwallis...

The young Hopeful of Yad Namuh, now becomes old Major Hopeful, falls sick in due course, and determines to go home. He takes the overland route-in those days an accomplishment of some magnitude-a feat to be talked of-and reaches England in due course. There were many things there, that surprized him greatly. The march of improvement had been going on steadily during his absence:

I discovered new towns, new streets, new houses, surrounded by thriving plantations and cultivation, where I had left nothing but bleak com mon. I found improvement had extended to every thing. I stared in amazement even at the lowest of our female grades in their ringlets of a Sunday, with silks, shawls, and other finery, that used to appertain exclusively to the upper classes in the olden time. The roads and pavements were fast giving way to the hammer of MacAdam. The streets were lit up with gas, save an aristocratic oil-lamp here and there to point out the fading glories of our ancestors; all marine excursions too were made by steam," at which the naval people were concerned." In short the march of intellect had been most wonderful, and I found it was dangerous to put questions either to boys or girls, who could not only reply to them, but confound you with others upon subjects that used formerly to be reckoned technical and abstruse. I was condemned to the silent system, until I had attended a course of lectures, and picked up a little "useful knowledge" for current purposes.

It is really very necessary for people freshly arrived from India to adopt "the silent system," if they are at all afraid of the natives sneering at their exclamations and enquiries. We well remember the tone of mingled wonderment and contempt, with which one of the sailors of the pilot-vessel, which conveyed us and some fellow passengers from the ship which brought us home, replied to the astonished exclamation of one of the party, that there were actually ladies walking about on the shore," La! Mum; that's nothing!" It seemed to the returned Anglo-Indian very strange that English ladies should be walking about anywhere by themselves; but not half so strange as it seemed to the English boatman, that any living creature should express astonishment at a phenomenon, which he was contemplating all day long.

We may here leave the writer of Yad Namuh, with his fifty years' experience, to spend a little time with another, who only boasts of ten. Captain Hervey's Ten years in India is an amusing, gossiping book, which, we suspect, few people will take up without reading to the conclusion. There is very little pretence about it-no attempt at fine writing-nothing, indeed, ultra crepidam. Captain Hervey gives us the result of his own experiences, in a plain soldier-like manner. He writes of things, which have come within his own observation, and of which he is qualified by experience to discourse. The book is obviously

written by one with a high sense of the duties of sepoy-officers; and is altogether the work of a very conscientious, a very candid, and a very intelligent mind. There is a simplicity and naiveté in the book, which more than atone for the absence of artistic skill. Captain Hervey records the experiences of his griffinage in a very artless and truthful manner. He tells us without reserve how he walked through the streets of Madras without a chattah; how he went to the pay-office to get his money changed; how he fell in love, made a simpleton of himself, neglected his duty, and lost the command of his company. For our own parts, we almost wonder how he got on, as an unposted ensign, at all. If native companies were, in those days, placed under the command of boys, doing duty only with chance regiments, we trust that the system has been by this time altogether abolished.

Captain Hervey went out to India in 1833. He was at that time, he tells us," a very little fellow indeed-so little that he was never expected to be bigger-so little that people looked on him with wonder and surprise, and exclaimed, "Is that child going to be an officer?"-so little that his guardians would not trust him with any larger sum of money than ten shillings, but gave ten pounds instead to the skipper to take care of for him.” And there is really no exaggeration in this; our author was then so little and so very youthful-looking, that, remembering his fair face, his light hair, and his boyish figure, we find it difficult to persuade ourselves that he can be the same Albert Hervey, who is now addressing us in three volumes octavo, and talking, like a veteran, of his "young friends." young friends." On his voyage out to India, Captain Hervey shared a cabin with a young writer, who, among other pleasant companionable qualities, had a taste for dissecting and stuffing sea-fowl, and hanging the unsavoury curiosities about the walls of the cabin. He describes the voyage out as a season of unmixed wretchedness, which he cannot contemplate even in the retrospect without horror. We can easily imagine what it must have been under the circumstances which Captain Hervey so feelingly pourtrays. It is bad enough to have a nuisance of any kind in an adjoining cabin, but to have to bear it for four or five months in one's own, must be intolerable. This anatomical mania, which often afflicts young Assistant-Surgeons in a very alarming way, is one of the greatest nuisances on ship-board; but, perhaps, the musical mania, which sometimes breaks out in our sailing vessels, is more terribly distracting still. Even pleasant music after a time becomes an affliction, when there is no escaping from it. We well remember how, during a homeward voyage, slowly recovering from a

severe fever, our escape from which was a very ́ miracle, we were so charmed with the tunes of a musical box, belonging to a lady in the next cabin-it was such a solace to us, during the long, long days, when we were forbidden to read or write, or even to converse, save for a few minutes at a time, that we could not help conveying an expression of gratitude to our fair neighbour-gratitude which, undisguisedly, partook somewhat largely of that imputed characteristic, "a lively hope of future favours." With true womanly kindness, the hint was taken. Fortunately for the box, it had no sense of weariness; for it was set to pour forth, almost continually for our delectation, its cheering and enlivening notes, until, instead of a joy and a solace to us, it became an agony and a distraction. What with our sufferings under the repetition of the same haunting tunes, our intense desire to be relieved from the tortures they inflicted upon us, and our misery at the thought of disturbing the belief of our kind-hearted neighbour that she was administering to our happiness and perhaps expediting our curewe, in our weak and irritable condition, painfully nervous and sensitive from the effects of repeated attacks of fever of the worst type, were wrought into such a state, that we believe we were on the very verge of a relapse, which would, in all probability, have terminated our existence, if a friend had not undertaken to secure, in the most delicate manner, the cessation of the trouble that was destroying us. And this was really pleasant music; which, in moderation, had comforted us and delighted us. If we had been outward, instead of homeward, bound, the music, that would have assailed our ears, would, in all probability, have been the wretched flute-practice of some sentimental Assistant-Surgeon or Cadet, mangling old tunes in a fragmentary dyspeptic manner, and well nigh driving to the brink of insanity men in stout health, with unshaken nerves, and a stock of patience worthy of the proverbial patriarch himself.

But Captain Hervey's voyage out, like all other voyages, came to an end, and he was safely landed at Madras. A sergeant came on board the ship, took charge of him, and carried him off to the Cadets' barracks. Of these quarters he gives no very encouraging account; but, unless our own recollections are greatly at fault, he has in no way exaggerated the case:

I found several old Addiscombe friends already arrived at the Cadet's quarters, all griffs as young and inexperienced as your humble servant. There was a mess kept for us, three meals a day, for which we had to pay most dreadfully; every thing to be had was bad; and knavery and cheating. in the most glaring colours reigned supreme in this asylum-a place kept on purpose by Government, to give the poor inexperienced Cadet a home

on first arrival, superintended by an officer who was of no use whatsoever, and frequented by the greatest thieves and vagabonds in Madras, from the villain butler to the sweeper! The Cadet's quarters were intended, by those who had established them, to afford the friendless and ignorant young officers a home, and to prevent the possibility of their being imposed upon. The superintending officer's duty was to see that the rules of the establishment were strictly acted up to, and that the lads frequenting it had every thing that was required in consistency with the objects of its institution-economy and respectability. The feeding was execrable, the drink worse, the charges were enormous, and accommodation any thing but comfortable; the beds were swarming with vermin, the heat insufferable, and, from its situation, the building any thing but healthy. I never once saw the officer. The butler was paramount in authority, and I could compare him to nothing but the bull in the crockery-shop; for he had it all his own way, and a more consequential over-fed pariah rascal I never saw. I forget his name now; but the fellow, I recollect, had the insolence to show me his portrait (such as it was), as much as to say"If I were not an honest man, do you think I would have had my likeness taken?" I greatly exasperated the old thief by telling him, that I thought the picture more like a baboon than a human being, and certainly very much resembling his butlership.

This discreditable institution has, we believe, been abolished. We remember that, in Captain Hervey's time, the Bengal Cadets were carried off to this atrocious den, as ruthlessly as the Madras griffins, in spite of their protests, their struggles to emancipate themselves, and, in some instances, their measureless indignation at the thought of being interfered with by a "subordinate Government." We well remember our own unwillingness to yield the point, until satisfied, at the Town Major's, by an unanswerable extract from standing orders, originating with the supreme Government itself. It appeared to us incredible that the Governor or Commander-in-Chief of a minor Presidency could possibly have any controul over so important a personage as a Bengal Cadet.

Our young Cadet is soon put in orders to do duty with a native regiment. Among other discoveries which he soon makes, is one to the effect that promotion is wretchedly slow; and that it is hard to say what, in process of time, must become of the army, if no steps are taken to get the old hands out of the way :

Would that promotion were a little quicker in the Indian army than it now is! If it progresses so slowly as it does, when are we, of the present day, to become field-officers? What an old set of fellows we shall be by the time we arrive at the rank of Lieutenant-Colonels, or General Officers! Pity it is indeed that some arrangements are not made to clear off the numbers of superannuated officers at present on the retired list, enjoying their off-reckoning funds without doing any duty to deserve the benefit; such a riddance would give the Majors and Captains a better chance of being efficient men when they find themselves at the heads of their regiments. At the present rate, many of us can never expect to be Majors under thirty