sors.

The Divorce Bill has been the grand topic of debate, after India. Neither of the two can be strictly considered a very domestic matter. The Divorce Bill retains all the injustice that characterised the former state of the law in England. We see very little improvement in the new bill except in the economy of costs, which will extend the remedy from persons with incomes of so many thousands to others with incomes of the same number of hundreds. The Commons resigned, but the Peers retained the male privilege of committing offences in their own houses with impunity, which would warrant the divorce of females under any circumstances. We cannot say that this is equal legislation between husband and wife, and we have no doubt that the present bill is only a preliminary to other measures, notwithstanding the Premier's opinion on the subject.

The debates on India have not cast more light on this dismal swamp than may be found in the correspondence from that country. A numerous army of British soldiers is gradually advancing over the waters for Calcutta; and Sir Colin Campbell will direct a stronger force than any British general ever wielded in Hindostan. Hereafter, and for a very long period, a much larger British force will be retained in Bengal; and the insurrection will prove a heavy loss to the races whose representatives have joined in its criminality. It cannot in this sense prove to be a loss to the individuals themselves, of whom the major part will be put out of the way of meeting farther loss in this life.

A public meeting was held in the Mansion House, London, on the 25th, to devise measures for the relief of the sufferers by the insurrection; and we have no doubt that, both by individual and governmental aid, the pecuniary losses of families will be met where assistance of that nature is necessary.

Parliament was prorougued on the 28th ultimo, notwithstanding the grave nature of the intelligence from India, which includes the death of Sir George Barnard at Delhi by cholera; of Sir H. Lawrence, at Lucknow, of wounds; and of Sir H. Wheeler, at Cawnpore, from the same cause. The capture of Cawnpore, and the slaughter of five hundred Europeans, by Nena Sahib, is confirmed. The recapture of that fort by General Havelock, after thrice defeating Nena Sahib, is also known. In the sorties from Delhi the mutineers appear to have lost four to five thousand men, but they re

The assassinations and barbarities perpetrated by the Mohammedans and Brahmins on defenceless British subjects cannot be detailed, but will be revenged.

Nena Sahib, whose conduct seems most execrable, is better known here as the Pershwa. His agents resided in London until lately, professing to advocate his claim to the pension of the late Pershwa; but they merely spent money, living in a style of great magnificence in Brighton and in the metropolis. Nena Sahib is irritated probably on that account.

The Bombay and Madras armies continue loyal.

THE RYOTS OF INDIA.

War, with its horrid chain of devastating misery, seems to have become the heritage of England. Before the Crimean terrors are forgotten, Indian horrors arise, and the daily papers are again a dreadful source of anxiety and interest.

Bengal, so lately the scene of prosperity, is now the theatre of savage ferocity and mutinous revolt. Her cities the prey of barbarian destruction-her plains echoing the cry of woe-armies traversing those plains, all bent on the same fearful objectall pressing to the one aim of conquest, through a world of blood, and death, and ruin! Ruin, not to the well-known and wealthy alone, the merchant, the banker, the opulent trader of every class; these suffer, as a matter of course, suffer largely, severely, but the possibility of retrieval will come to them through the very possession of their wealth. But war descends with her scourging rod, and lashes those whom the world has lashed already—those who have felt the pinch of poverty, and who, by honest labour, either their own, or those near and dear to them, have sought, hoped, to ward it off. Such we learn arrive daily in crowds at Calcutta. Women, children, men who hold small Government appointments, and others, coming friendless, helpless, penniless, their all lost; themselves driven from house and home; cast forth on the world by the fearful avalanche of war which has so suddenly burst on them. All occupations are suspended, and none to be obtained in place of that which is gone-no money, either to purchase the common necessaries of life or pay for the passage to another country where labour might produce it. Such is the fate of thousands, and the numbers must swell as war stalks on in that devoted land.

Government institutions there are, but their resources are inadequate to meet an exigency like the present; besides, their relief, as far as it can be granted, is confined to certain classes alone.

Now, war confines her devastations to no grade, no class, no country. She throws her brand indiscriminatingly on all, and fires the European palace as relentlessly as the Hindoo cottage-mows down as unsparingly the noble scion of a prinely stock as the unknown soldier of fortune. Thus does she deal now; and, while we see her scourg. ing hand fall on those either of our own race or akin to it, we must not forget a class, a large and most important class, one on whom India's prosperity very much depends, whom she now threatens with ruin, horrible, fearful, irretrievable ruin. We allude to the ryots, the agricultural classes of Bengal, the peasantry, in fact, who form a very large proportion of the population; and, to make our readers more fully understand their position and their bearing on the community, we will shortly describe their social circumstances, character, and mode of life.

In their social position they are, as we before said, the peasantry, the labourers, those who till the ground. Their gain (little enough, it is true,) is sufficient for their wants. Simple to a degree in their habits, unambitious in their views, they pass their lives in the monotonous routine of their daily toil, content, if nothing else. To such the present war must bring hopeless misery, for the very tenour of their lives unfits them for coping with the difficulties which it must necessarily entail on them. Activity is unknown to themexertion foreign to their nature-so when the horrid cry of "famine " (the inevitable result of this war, should it continue) is heard in their land, they will simply lie down and die, unless help, which, from the magnitude of the evil, it seems almost hopeless to expect, should be offered to them. In character, they are a simple-minded race, unoffending, sober, honest, unskilled-or, at least, unpractised in the world's cunning and treachery; they know nothing of monarchies or of governments; care nothing for the constituted authority of their country; perhaps they have an undefined preference for the English-for we have afforded them protection in life and limb at least -and on them in their simple iguorance war falls as severely, perhaps more severely, than upon any other class. They live in villages which are scattered over the whole of the Bengalese Presidency; are governed by, or rather, we should say, they refer all causes of dispute among themselves to the head man of the village, a sort of self-elected, self-constituted mayor or patriarch of the place.

This Kardar, as he is called, holds this dignified position simply from the fact of his being more wealthy than his neighbours; he generally rents lands under government, and does not, contribute to the tillage of the land by his own manual labour. He lives in a house little better than the

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rest--and is, in fact, only removed from then by the increased opulence of his position. We say that he lives in a house; but by this we do not mean a substantial edifice of brick and stone. The houses of the ryots, and even of the Kardar, are simply mud huts of the most miserable construction -containing only one room, no door, no fire place, no furniture, except a miserable apology for a bed and a hand-mill for grinding corn. Their food consists principally of maize cakes and goat's milk, when they can get them. Their religion is Hindoo; polygamy, as being one of the tenets of that religion, is, of course, permitted, but the ryots are generally content with one wife.

Now, we look at the consequences of the present war, as it stands, with regard to them. Their labour has already to a great extent in many districts been suspended. Agriculture there is at an end. The landowners themselves are obliged to fly! The poor ryot is thrown completely out of employment. So much for the present-even now distress among them must be no fabled vision

but the future will be too horrible a picture to contemplate. Agriculture at an end-labour also at an end-what must be the result? Famine. For men must eat although they may not work, and the poor ryot cannot live without food, though so little suffices him. Thus at least two-thirds of the population of Bengal will be reduced to a state of desperation, and what will desperate men not do? Pillaged of everything by the lawless hordes, who always form one of the concomitants of war, utterly powerless either to resist or to ameliorate their condition, these poor wretches must either lie down and die, or join the dacoits --or native robbers-and gain, as they do, a subsistence for their starving families--a terrible fate, a terrible employment for the now simple child of nature, the innocent Hindoo peasant, the harmless ryot, who has not been called on to enlist, and has never mutinied, therefore.

Again, even should the present war terminate speedily, distress, deep distress, must be felt by this class, and for this reason. The present time is the harvest season; that harvest to a very great extent is interrupted, corn will in a few months be scarce the price exorbitant. How, then, are these labourers, whose revenue drawn from their labour has ceased, whose miserable position prevents their having made any provision, or accumulated any little store of mouey, to obtain that coru at an increased rate, when under ordinary circumstances a daily modicum is all they can purchase? Without remedy, without help, they must either die or live a lawless life-victims to a fate they could neither foresee, prevent, nor change, and in the terrible distress of many among the European population their case should not be overlooked.

step from the sublime to the ridiculous. How ever, a man may fish in the New River even! We were rather cast down on glancing over these recreations, and began to consider and count backwards, to ascertain whether it could have been possible that we had read them, so as to have enjoyed them, and to have remembered them when they appeared originally in Blackwood. It is horrible if true. Why, it is a lifetime almost since their publication. Only, of course, it might have been in bound volumes of the Magazine that we had seen them. But it now appears that they were published separately in 1842. That is bad enough-fifteen years since; yet it must have been then that we read the following passage from a racy Highland sermon, by a deposed minister, who, at least, had the advantage of ease and grace in composition, although we may as well remember that the outed scholar commences but at Brethren, all before-that is to say, all the descriptive matter-belongs to the wild Professor, who acknowledged that he was never entirely at himself among moors and mosses mony."

The Presbytery might have overlooked your fault, Mac, for the case was not a flagrant one, and you were willing, we understand, to make her an honest woman. Do you think you could recollect one of your sermons? In action and in unction you had not your superior in the Synod. Do give us a screed about Nimrod, or Nebuchadnezzar. No desecration in a sermon-better omitted, we grant, prayer and psalm. Should you be unable to produce an entire discourse, yet by dovetailing-that is a bit from one and a bit from another surely you cannot be at a loss for half an hour's miscellaneous matter; heads and tails. Or suppose we let you off with a view of the Church Question. You look glum, and shake your head. Can you, Mac, how can you resist that pulpit P

Behold in that semicircular, low-brimmed cliff, backed by a range of bonny green braes, dipping down from the hills, that do themselves come shelving from the mountains, which appears at first sight to be a cave, but is merely a blind window, as it were, a few feet deep, arched and faced like a beautiful work of masonry, though chisel never touched it, nor man's hand dropped the line along the living stone thus wrought by nature's self, which often shows us, in her mysterious processes, resemblance of effects produced by us, her children, in the same material, by our most elaborate art. It is a very pulpit, and that projecting slab is the sounding board. That upright stone in the front of it, without the aid of fancy, may well be thought the desk. To us sitting here, this spot of greensward is the floor; the sky, that hangs low, as if it loved it, the roof of the sanctuary; nor is there any harm in saying that we, if we choose to think so, are sitting in a kirk.

bridge. But the most powerful of them all stands on the Man constructs a ship, and Leach and gazes on the ocean. encircles the globe. Other creatures must traverse the element nature has assigned, with means she has furnished. He chooses his element and makes his means. Can the fish traverse the waters ?-so can he. Can the bird fly in the air P-so can he. Can the camel speed over the desert? He shall bear man as his rider.

Do you want to see the deep inland Highlands neither the Trossachs, nor Ben Lomand, nor the shores of Loch Long-not even Glencoe and its environs-nothing that you can reach by steam or four horses in harness ?-then this is the month. Wait until October, and you may be caught in rolling clouds of mist a dozen miles from bed and board, without a road that mortal macadamisers ever made to guide you homeward. Wait until November, and it is very sublime. But perhaps you were not made for that kind of sublimityvery few people are. Go now-to-morrow or the next day-and return into quiet, steady going civilization, when the sun gets his work fairly divided-for the event is certain to be celebrated among these hills in what you might consider a and obliging little "burn" which provokingly turns very extraordinary manner-and that most civil and wheels, and runs backwards and forwards, like your young dog amongst your feet, might sweep these same feet from you in its angry sport. fessor Wilson talked of Northern Argyleshire as the most varied scenery. He was wrong-an ignorant deluded man.

Pro

Northern Argyleshire is, of course,

much superior to Wales, north or south, and has many Snowdons, there is no doubt of that; but Northern Argyleshire is not equal to Western Aberdeenshire and Northern Perthshire, either in the height of its mountains or the terrors of their precipices. A thousand feet sheer down is nothing there a mere leap, as it were, rather high, and not to be taken without paying the landlady and making a note of one's affairs in this world-much in itself, but small by comparison. Christopher North alleged, indeed, that the buck's head in his study belonged to a stag once, and the beast was shot in Braemar, but that is a long word—a forty miles long word--and he did not say who shot the brute.

For the benefit of tourists, who may prefer his advice to ours, or who may follow both, we quote what he has to say of the climate of Northern Argyleshire.

What a wild world of clouds all over that vast central wilderness of Northern Argyllshire, lying between Cruachan and Melnatorran, Corryfinuarach and Ben Slarive, a prodigious land! defying description and memory, resembling not realities, but like fragments of tremendous dreams. Is it a sterile region? Very. In places nothing but stones, not a blade of grass, not a bent of heather-not even moss. And so they go shouldering up into the sky-enormous masses, huger than churches or ships. And sometimes not unlite such and other structures-all huddled together-yet never jostling, so far as we have seen; and though often over hanging, as if the wind might blow them over with a puff. steadfast in the storm that seems rather to be an earthquake, and moving not a hair's breadth, while all the shingly sides of the mountain-you know shingles-with an inconstant