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Though," says Maurice, "the functions of government by the laws of Menu devolved on the Kettri, or Rajah tribe; yet it is certain that in every age of the Indian empire, aspiring Brahmins have usurped and swayed the imperial sceptre. But, in fact, there was no necessity for the Brahmin to grasp at empire-he wielded both the empire and the monarch. By an overstrained conception of the priestly character, artfully encouraged for political purposes by the priest himself, and certainly not justified by any precept given by Noah to his posterity, the Brahmin stood in the place of Deity to the infatuated sons of Indian superstition; the will of Heaven was thought to issue from his lips; and his decision was reverenced as the fiat of destiny. Thus boasting the positive interposition of the Deity in the fabrication of its singular institutions-guarded from infraction by the terror of exciting the Divine wrath-and directed principally by the sacred tribe, the Indian government may be considered as a theocracy—a theocracy the more terrible, because the name of God was perverted to sanction and support the most dreadful species of despotism,-a despotism which, not content with subjugating the body, tyrannized over the prostrate faculties of the enslaved mind.

"An assembly of Brahmins sitting in judgment on a vicious, a tyrannical king, may condemn him to death; and the sentence is recorded to have been executed; but no crime affects the life of a Brahmin. He may

suffer temporary degradation from his caste, but his blood must never stain the sword of justice; he is a portion of the Deity. He is inviolable! he is invulnerable! he is immortal!

“In eastern climes, where despotism has ever reigned in its meridian terror, in order to impress the deeper awe and respect upon the crowd that daily thronged around the tribunal, the hall of justice was anciently surrounded with the ministers of vengeance, who generally inflicted in presence of the monarch the sentence to which the culprit was doomed. The envenomed serpent which was to sting him to death,-the enraged

elephant that was to trample him beneath its feet,-the dreadful instruments that were to rend open his bowels, to tear his lacerated eye from the socket, to impale alive, or saw the shuddering wretch asunder, were constantly at hand. The audience chamber, with the same view, was decorated with the utmost cost and magnificence, and the East was rifled of its jewels to adorn it. Whatever little credit may in general be due to Philostratus, his description of the palace of Musicanus too nearly resembles the accounts of our own countrymen, of the present magnificence of some of the Rajahs, to be doubted, especially in those times when the hoarded wealth of India had not been pillaged. The artificial vines of gold, adorned with buds of various colours in jewelry, and thick set with precious stones, emeralds, and rubies, hanging in clusters to resemble grapes in their different stages to maturity: the silver censers of perfume constantly borne before the ruler as a god: the robe of gold, and purple with which he was invested; and the litter of gold fringed with pearls, in which he was carried in a march, or to the chase, these were the appropriate ornaments and distinctions of an Indian monarch.

"In short, whatever could warmly interest the feelings, and strongly agitate the passions of men,-whatever influences hope-excites terror-all the engines of a most despotic superstition and a most refined policy, were set at work for the purpose of chaining down to the prescribed duties of his caste the mind of the bigoted Hindoo. Hence his unaltered, unalterable attachment to the national code and the Brahminical creed. As it has been in India from the beginning, so will it continue to the end of time. For the daring culprit who violates either, Heaven has no forgiveness, and earth no place of shelter or repose!

"An adultress is condemned to be devoured alive by dogs in the public market-place. The adulterer is doomed to be bound to an iron bed, heated red-hot, and burnt to death. But what is not a little remarkable,

for the same crime a Brahmin is only to be punished with ignominious tonsure.

"For insulting a Brahmin, an iron stile, ten fingers long, shall be thrust, red-hot, down the culprit's mouth. For offering only to instruct him in his profession, boiling oil shall be dropped in his mouth and ears. For stealing kine belonging to priests, the offender shall instantly lose half one foot. An assaulter of a Brahmin, with intent to kill, shall remain in hell for a hundred years; for actually striking him, with like intent, a thousand years. But though such frequent exceptions occur in favour of Brahmins, none are made in favour of kings! The Brahmin-eldest-born of the gods,-who loads their altars with incense, who feeds them with clarified honey, and whose, in fact, is the wealth of the whole world, ever keeps his elevated station. To maintain him in holy and voluptuous indolence, the Kettri, or Rajah, exposes his life in front of battle; the merchant covers the ocean with his ships; the toiling husbandman incessantly tills the burning soil of India. We cannot doubt, after this, which of the Indian castes compiled this volume from the remembered Institutes of Menu.

"The everlasting servitude of the Soodra tribe is riveted upon that unfortunate caste by the laws of destiny; since the Soodra was born a slave, and even when emancipated by his indulgent master, a slave he must continue: for, of a state which is natural to him, by whom can he be divested? The Soodra must be contented to serve; this is his unalterable doom. To serve in the family of a Brahmin is the highest glory, and leads him to beatitude."

There is, however, a fifth tribe-that of the outcasts from all the rest-the Chandelahs; those who have lost caste, and the children of mixed marriages, that abhorrence of the Hindoo code, for, if once permitted, it would overturn the whole artful system. It is ordained that the Chandelah exist remote from their fellow-creatures, amid the dirt and filth of the suburbs. Their sole wealth must consist in dogs and asses

their clothes must be the polluted mantles of the dead; their dishes for food, broken pots; their ornaments, rusty iron; their food must be given them in potsherds, at a distance, that the giver may not be defiled by the shade of their outcast bodies. Their business is to carry out the corpses of those who die without kindred; they are the public executioners; and the whole that they can be heirs to are the clothes and miserable property of the wretched malefactors. Many other particulars of this outcast tribe are added by authors on India, and they form in themselves no weak proof of the unrelenting spirit of the Hindoo code, that could thus doom a vast class of people—a fifth of the nation -to unpitied and unmerited wretchedness. An Indian, in his bigoted attachment to the metempsychosis, would fly to save the life of a noxious reptile; but, were a Chandelah falling down a precipice, he would not extend a hand to save him from destruction. In such abomination are the Chandelahs held on the Malabar side of India, that if one chance to touch one of a superior tribe, he draws his sabre and cuts him down on the spot. Death itself, that last refuge of the unfortunate, offers no comfort to him, affords no view of felicity or reward. The gates of Jaggernath itself are shut against him; and he is driven with equal disgrace from the society of men and the temples of the gods.

Such is the picture of priestcraft in India; such the terrible spectacle of its effects, as they have existed there from nearly the days of the Flood. Towards this horrible and disgusting goal it has laboured to lead men in all countries and all ages; but here alone, in the whole pagan world, it has succeeded to the extent of its diabolical desires. We might add numberless other features: the propitiatory sacrifice of cows, and trees of gold, prescribed by the avaricious Brahmins; the immunities and privileges with which they have surrounded themselves; the bloody rites they have laid on others, especially among the Mahrattas, where, even at the present day, human sacrifices are supposed to abound; the tortures they have induced

the infatuated Yogees to inflict on themselves-some going naked all their lives, suffering their hair and beard to grow till they cover their whole bodies,— standing motionless, in the sun, in the most painful attitudes, for years, till their arms grow fast above their heads, and their nails pierce through their clenched hands, scorching themselves over fires,-enclosing, themselves in cages, and enacting other incredible horrors on themselves, for the hope inspired by the Brahmins of attaining everlasting felicity. But the subject is too revolting; I turn from it in indignation.

CHAPTER IX.

THE HEBREWS.

Hebrews-Comparison of the Old Man of the Sea, and the Old Man of the Church-Hebrew Priesthood divinely ordained, yet evil in its tendency and fatal to the nation.

We have now gone to and fro in the earth, and have walked up and down in it; not, like a certain celebrated character, seeking whom we might devour, but inquiring who have been devoured of priests; and everywhere we have made but one discovery; everywhere, in lands however distant, and times however remote, a suffering people, and a proud and imperious priesthood have been found. Sinbad the sailor, in his multifarious and adventurous wanderings, once chanced to land on a desert island, in which a strange creature, the Old Man of the Sea, leaped upon his shoulders, and there, spite of all his efforts to dislodge him, night and day, for a long time maintained his station. By day, he compelled poor Sinbad by a vigorous application of his heels to his ribs, to go where he pleased,-beneath the trees whence he plucked fruit, or to the stream where he drank. By night he still clung, even in his