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THE

CALCUTTA REVIEW.

MARCH, 1856.

ART. I.-1. The Gong. By MAJOR VETCH. Edinburgh, 1852. 2. An Englishman's Life in India.

London, 1853.

3. Tales of the Forest. London, 1853.

By H. MOSES, M. D.

4. Sport in the Himalaya. By LIEUT. COL. MARKHAM. London,

1854.

5. A Selection from the Writings of the late Henry Torrens, B. A.

Calcutta, 1854.

6. Bole Ponjis. By H. MEREDITH PARKER. London, 1851. 7. The Delhi Sketch Book.

Delhi.

8. The Newspaper Press in India.

ANGLO-INDIANS are not without honorable representatives in the realm of letters. Sir William Jones, Wilford, and Elphinstone enjoy a reputation scarcely inferior to that of Hastings, Wellesley, and Metcalfe, and yet we are hardly entitled to style ourselves a literary community. The fact is, that books do not necessarily constitute a literature. Many and weighty are the tomes put forth by the Asiatic Society, but the writers of those abstruse papers, men honored and honorable in their vocation, would not venture to claim a place in the sacred Walhalla of illustrious authors. Even those famous men whom we have mentioned, leaders of the heavy brigade of Anglo-Indian scholarship, would retreat modestly from that threshold, being themselves the first to acknowledge that as had been their work so must be their reward; as they had forced secrets from nature, or from the scarcely less reluctant obscurity of byegone ages, so they were to be honored as men of science, as antiquarians, as philologists; but inas

A

much as their written works had been only as it were the accidental supplement of their discoveries, they neither demanded nor wished to be judged by them. The energies of a great author are in his writings;-the writings of the most celebrated orientalists have been but the record of the practical work to which their energies had been devoted. Hence it follows that Sir William Jones, the greatest name in Anglo-Indian literature, is praised by hundreds, but read by units: hence it follows that Mount Stuart Elphinstone, the learned, faithful, painstaking and accomplished historian of India, is indeed an invaluable guide to the professional man or the deliberate student in India, but caviare to the general reader in England. It is no disparagement to those eminent men to whom India owes so much, to say that in the gift of expression they appear mostly to have been deficient. This is a deficiency which in this garrulous age we may not only pardon, but even envy in the case of men whose costiveness of words has been recompensed by copiousness of deeds: they did good service-better none-in ascertaining the condition and antecedents of the new countries of which England had become possessed, and if in the record of these discoveries they neither aimed at nor attained the supplementary reputation of being brilliant authors, we have little ground for wonder, and none for

censure.

But while this division of Indian worthies moves on with dignified confidence to its own proper resting place in the temple of Fame, nor cares to linger before the Court of Letters where its proper resting place is not, this latter Court is besieged by a noisier and inferior troop-peremptorily demanding admittance in the name of Anglo-Indian light literature.

Poets it is confessed we have not. Biographers and historians are equally wanting: nor is this unnatural. We AngloIndians form, after all, not a nation but a colony; not even a colony but a garrison; we take our serious literature like our pale ale from the mother country; why should we produce what we can so easily import? But inasmuch as we are a community of educated Europeans, enjoying on the whole considerable leisure, what more natural than that we should expatiate in the more flowery fields of letters; that we should take our chance, nay that we should excel as epigrammatists, as writers of articles, as novelists or as wits?

Certainly, this is the one style of literature which AngloIndian life has evinced a tendency to call forth; and it would appear at first sight as if the demand for amusement on the one hand, and the vacant hours which we all have to dispose of in this country on the other, did furnish a combination of circumstances favourable to a supply of successful literature. It

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