palankeen-bearers. The joiner appears only in the door, and perhaps also in the roof, his other duties lying exclusively in preparing agricultural implements and vehicles. In fact, no arts are encouraged by the Indian household, but those connected with culinary preparation; and here the patronage is scanty. What skill have not our kitchens and tables called forth among founders, brasiers, tin-smiths, platers, cutlers, potters, glassmakers, and many a craft beside! But to the Hindu fire-side the brazier and potter alone are called, and they are only required to produce a few pots of beaten (not cast) brass, and a few of coarse earthenware. Consequently, though the art of founding is carried to a high state of perfection for casting guns and gods, it has no domestic application. Cutlery exists almost exclusively for the arsenal; and porcelain of any kind is unknown. The Hindu craftsmen are, however, ready copyists. They soon become good coach-builders, good cabinet-makers, or good artisans in any line in which our models are placed before them. Nor are they slow to adopt new plans, if they offer a prospect of remuneration; but, on the contrary, eagerly and precisely imitate our furniture, our boots, and our cotton cloths.

The chief—and, except ornamental weaving, embroidery, and dyeing or printing cloth, almost the only-ornamental art of India lies in the hands of the jeweller and goldsmith. The fame of these is old and high. Their chain and filagree work are exquisite, and, considering their tools, perfectly marvellous. The goldsmiths, as a caste, are obnoxious to the Bramhans, whose dress and appearance they closely imitate, claiming for themselves a far higher rank than the lordly Priests judge seemly.

Man's

The idea of fine arts has never had an existence in India. infantine, almost instinctive, art of drawing nutriment from his mother earth, ranks beside pursuits that require the finest endowments. All art is servile, and consigned to the servile class. Then it is impossible to adjust the culture of fine arts upon the hereditary system. It would be rather difficult to legislate for lineal generations of musicians, painters, architects, and sculptors. Musicians can never rise above the level of our ale-house fiddlers; painters do not rank so high as our honest men who make sign-boards; and architects and sculptors are all confounded in the herd of workers in stone. As a necessary consequence, all these arts are in a contemptible posture. A Hindu youth of respectability who felt he could draw, would be under as little temptation to indulge his taste as the son of an English gentleman who thought he could make nails. The hereditary system shocks nature, and stuns her with the shock. All men naturally honour two classes of possessions, the gifts of God, and the fruits of industry. Genius is, of all possessions, the one most immediately the gift of God: the works of genius exhibit both God's gift and man's labour; and to them universal instinct hastens with a tribute. To fix those arts, for success in which genius is indispensable, in the crowd of drudgeries for which men want only hands and eyes, is to violate instinct, and to chain nature.

Their music is wretched, though favoured above the other arts; for a Bramhan may play, though he may never company with the professional musicians. Their instruments are dissonant and harsh. They have a gamut, and know sixteen tunes, some say, thirty-two; but the natives always told me the former number. Their singing is a low chant, with considerable sweetness, but little feeling or power. Painting has never been taken into the service of religion, and is very backward. They

colour incomparably; but proportion and perspective are out of the question. They paint much on tale, of which the polish and transparency greatly heighten the effect of their brilliant colours. Sculpture, though so honoured by religion, is not in an advanced state. I never saw a specimen that would be tolerated in any European collection, except as a curiosity. In carving they have wonderful delicacy of hand; but with the same faults that vitiate their painting and sculpture.

The various castes, of which we have thus given a hasty sketch, dwell completely apart. The prohibition to intermarry is in itself a great gulf between class and class: and the separation is widened by the inability to eat together; for, so far are they distant, that a man cannot eat food cooked by a person of a lower caste, or served by him, or placed in a vessel he has touched. The peculiar stamp given to each caste by strict continuity in the same pursuit for many generations, parts them wider still. Two men may be born in one street, and may converse every day; but they are always strangers, beings of different species. In consequence, a man's affections, instead of being free for the whole community, are wrapped up in his caste. With the caste he rises or falls, is praised or blamed. The commonwealth may prove even vital changes, not one of which touches him; but you cannot place at stake the least interest of his caste, without awaking all his sensibilities. Hence much of what is constantly cited as their reproach,-a want of patriotism. It is not so much that they are destitute of feeling, as that the allegiance which other nations give to the commonwealth, they give to the caste. In fact, their commonwealth is the caste, not the nation. "It is not my caste to fight or govern; and if those whose caste it is fail, why, it is a pity: I am sorry to see the reins of power fall into new hands; but how can it be helped?" Such are the feelings with which a change of government is viewed. But attempt to touch the rights or violate the usages of the caste, and this same man will rush furiously to its defence. In such a case no resistance would be too wild to attempt; no miseries too hard to endure; nor would they be quelled till after ruinous overthrows.

Of all calamities that can befall a Hindu, the sorest is the loss of caste. This generally arises from some offence against ceremonial purity, or caste usage: such as the omission of established rites on occasion of a marriage, birth, or other important event; neglecting to sacrifice to ancestors; eating with a person of another caste, or out of vessels that had been used by them; or abandonment of the caste religion. In the case of a Bramhan, drunkenness ought to be punished with expulsion; but that vice is rare; and I did hear of a wealthy Bramhan who practised it with impunity. Of the condition to which a man is reduced by expulsion, a competent witness thus speaks: "He is a man as it were dead to the world. He is no longer in the society of men. By losing his caste, the Hindu is bereft of friends and relations, and often of wife and children, who will rather forsake him than share in his miserable lot. No one dares to eat with him, or even to pour him out a drop of water. If he has marriageable daughters, they are shunned; no other girls can be approached by his sons. Wherever he appears, he is scorned and pointed at as an outcaste. If he sinks under the grievous curse, his body is suffered to rot on the place where he dies. Even if, in losing his caste, he could descend into an inferior one, the evil would be less; but he has no such resource. A Shudra, little scrupulous as he is about honour or delicacy, would scorn to give his daughter in marriage even to a Bramhan thus

VOL. IV.-FOURTH SERIES.

F

degraded. If he cannot re-establish himself in his own caste, he must sink into the infamous tribe of the Pariah, or mix with persons whose caste is equivocal."

Whether "the infamous tribe of the Pariah," the unhappy multitude who lie below the sacred line of caste, are the descendants of those who have been expelled from all the castes, or whether they represent an aboriginal race, crushed by a conquest too remote for any existing record, are points we could not determine, and need not discuss. But of whatever origin, they are found all over India, divided into Pariahs and Chucklers ; the latter, who find a wretched living by working in leather, being as much despised by the other outcastes as they are by people of caste. The outcaste may not live in the common street; and in some parts of the extreme south, he may not even walk the street where the Bramhans reside. He is forbidden the house of all the castes; but in some districts may enter that part where the cattle are housed, and may even show his head and one foot inside the door of his master's apartment. To touch him, to enter his house, to drink water he had drawn, to eat food he had cooked, to use a vessel he had touched, to sit down beside him, to ride in the same vehicle, or even to give him a drink of water, would be unlawful for a man of caste. He would take a proposal for anything of the kind as a mortal affront. The condition of an American or West Indian slave is worse than theirs only in one respect, compulsory labour. But the slave may tread the same floor as his master, without polluting the whole house; he may enter the room where he sits, touch the dish he uses, sleep under the same roof, and prepare the food he eats. He is not made to feel that his step defiles a room; that his touch infects the purest wares; and that he carries in his own body, no matter how clean or tidy, a cursed incurable filthiness which fills with disgust all who have proper human sentiments. He has at least the privilege of a domestic animal. Above all, he may possibly die free; his children may be intelligent and respectable. But the outcaste has no hopes: no manumission can change his birth; he must bear his curse down to the grave; he must bequeath it to his children, who will bequeath it in turn, and from generation to generation on it must go, nor can any power arrest it, except one, of which he knows not. Nothing can elevate the outcaste, till the Gospel has taught his neighbours to own his rights. Every Englishman would ten thousand times prefer being a slave, permitted some semblance of intercourse with the rest of mankind, and having a possibility of ransom, with the glorious prospect of leaving his children free, to being an outcaste driven to live beyond the village-wall, hunted from every door, scorned by the most base, loathed by the most vile, and knowing that this malediction awaits his little ones.

The morals and the manners of this hapless race too well answer to the degradation of their lot. But Dubois's picture is overdrawn: I never saw anything that would warrant such language as, "There is a coarseness about them which excites abhorrence. Their harsh and rugged features betray their inward character." They are necessarily inferior in appearance to the caste people; but when received as servants into European families, and respectably clothed, many of them are well-looking and agreeable. Even in their most wretched villages they excite, not so much abhorrence, as pity. They are very miserable and very immoral. Their living is precarious: sometimes employed as scavengers, (for which the same writer holds them up to disgust,) sometimes as horse-keepers, porters,

or messengers; for the most part labouring in the fields for three-halfpence or two-pence a day; often selling themselves for a term to a farmer, or reduced to a kind of slavery as payment of debt, they never venture to hope for aught but poverty and shame. When labour fails, charity lends no substitute; for, though I find, in the sacred books, directions for alms to outcastes, I never heard of such a thing taking place. The outcaste sees costly entertainments for beggars; but not one of these beggars would admit him to the honour of washing his dish, or dine in a room that his presence stained. Thus they are driven to eat all disgusting things: no sooner does a beast die, be the disease what it may, than a crowd of these hungry beings surround the carrion,—and even for carrion they have generally to pay. Crows, rats, snakes, reptiles, almost everything, is pressed into the service of destitute nature, and drunkenness follows to crown their shame and woe.

It is said that, on one part of the Malabar coast, a section of outcastes is so abhorred that they are not allowed to erect houses, only an open shed supported on four bamboos; and that they may not approach a caste person nearer than a hundred yards, but must give notice of their approach by a loud cry. To prevent the danger of contact, they are forbidden the highway.

It is difficult to estimate the number of outcastes: possibly they may be a tenth of the whole population.* If so, we have here TWENTY MILLIONS of human beings felled to the dust, and stamped upon by tyrannies almost incredible. Twenty millions, under the mild sceptre of England, who, though their neighbour be as poor, as ignorant, as vicious as they, dare not touch his hand, or enter his door! Twenty millions, who are held to be by nature filthy, and who, as the snail may not bound nor the jackal fly, so may not aspire to the society of man! It is sad. Christianity, her heart touched to see a twentieth of this number bound in the West, drew their chain around herself, and, by the heaving of her breast, rent it in twain. But the chain of this Eastern bondage cannot be rent: it must be gently melted. A whole people must be taught before the outcaste may even venture to use the plea, by which the negro thrilled every Christian heart, "Am I not a man and a brother?" O what scorn and wrath would that plea, did he dare to use it, bring on the head of the outcaste! It would sound at present as a treason against all order and all nature. It would shock and revolt the whole community. He a brother! No, no! the frog may as well announce himself a lion, or the beetle claim kindred with the dove. England did a great and a kind deed when she lifted out of the dust a million of men, and built them a home on the rock of her own constitution; but she will do a greater and a kinder when, by the gracious help of God, she restores, to the frame of human society, those many millions who have been amputated and cast away, like a mortified limb.

European influence has already done much for the outcastes. They have been universally employed as domestic servants, a privilege never conceded to them by their own countrymen ; have been admitted to the army; have in many cases obtained lucrative situations; while in Mission-schools not a few have received the forbidden blessing of education. In large English settlements they are now raised above oppression on the part of the castes, though, of course, still subject to their exclusion. Lord Hardinge's ordinance, opening public employment to all who have qualified themselves by

* Dubois says a fifth.

education, will in time much ameliorate their lot. And as the character of the English becomes more known, their servants will be raised in general esteem. At first the castes, seeing that Europeans admitted Pariahs to their houses, and ate food of their preparing, regarded them with contempt, as belonging to the Pariah class. On this account, some writers strongly censured the English for so outraging the prejudices of the people. But English common sense does not soon honour prejudices that rob multitudes of all their rights. The consequence will be, that the natives generally will learn to respect them more for acting on principles which their religion hallows; and at the same time the position of the outcastes will become insensibly elevated. But the influence of English life acts only within a narrow pale. All the British in India, soldiers included, are scarcely fifty thousand if each of these improve on an average the condition of four outcastes, that is but one in a hundred of the twenty millions. That hapless mass have no hope but in the general spread of our Saviour's blessed rule; and, alas! as yet their Christian fellow-subjects are little informed of their numbers or their wrongs.

Roaming the country, and inhabiting the jungles, are several tribes who have no more relation with society in general than our gipsies. Among these the most notable are the Lumbardi, who stroll about with troops of asses laden with grain, the sale of which is their ostensible vocation. Times of war are their harvest-days; for they sell their services dearly as foragers, and reap loads of plunder. The whole family travels: they live in small tents, and enjoy a reputation perfectly unenvied. All forests are tenanted by inoffensive but miserable races who precariously subsist on roots and game. Some of them are so wild as to have no hut; taking shelter in hollow trees and clifts, and even their women wearing only a few leaves. The following touching sketch is from the pen of Dubois :

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"The day after lying-in, the woman is obliged to scour the woods for food. Before setting out, she suckles the new-born infant, digs a little trench in the ground for a cradle, where she deposits the naked babe upon the bare earth; and, trusting to the care of Providence, goes with her husband and the rest of the family to find wherewithal to supply the wants of the day. This is not quickly obtained; and it is evening before they return. From three days old they accustom the child to solid food, and, in order to inure it betimes to the rigour of the seasons, they wash it every day in dew collected from the plants; and until the infant is able to accompany or follow the mother, it remains in this manner, from morning to night, in the recesses of the wood, exposed to the rain, the sun, and all the inclemency of the weather, stretched out in the little tomb that is its only cradle."

In the various mountain districts, are tribes who differ in manners, religion, and language, from the people of the adjacent plains. The clans inhabiting the central woods and mountains are black and dwarfish, with features after the African type. But the aborigines of the southern hills are fine and robust men, of lighter complexion than those of the lowlands. The Vishnu Purana gives this satisfactory account of the origin of the dwarfish central tribes: "King Vena had been slain for his impiety, when, his country being without a King, disorders arose, whereupon the sages consulted, and together rubbed the thigh of the King, who had left no offspring, to produce a son.' From the thigh thus rubbed, came forth a being with the complexion of a charred stake, with flattened features, and of dwarfish stature. What am I to do?' cried he eagerly to the Munis