Here Captain Seely sees some Hindoo houries, beautiful and innocent,' bathing and playing in a tank, and breaks out into the following rhapsody :

These are the same women who cheerfully burn themselves alive with the dead bodies of their husbands. Their life is that of pure innocence and chaste love. They are idolaters, and can neither read nor write, unsophisticated and untaught, yet possessing the highest moral attributes...... We, forsooth, are a polished nation, and purpose reforming the Hindoos, poor creatures! It is a pity that such a virtuous, docile, affectionate, sober, mild, and good tempered people should be calumniated by the whining cant of the day. But a truce to moralising, which from a pen like mine must be useless. These girls were symmetry itself, &c.' p. 50.

All the Hindoo women are virtuous and modest,—that is, all who are idolaters, for the Christians are bad enough ;-even the nautchanees, or dancing-girls, are paragons of every female virtue but one, and that one, apparently, is not held in much estimation by old Indians.

'I need not say, perhaps, that these dancing-girls are generally very young, very beautiful, very fond, and possessing the finest and most delicate forms that can well be imagined. True disciples of the Paphian Queen, they have none of the vices or defects that disgrace the sisterhood in Europe. Their manners are good, their tempers mild, and their dispositions of the most affectionate kind. Drunkenness, quarrelling, and swearing are unknown to them; in their habits, they are temperate, docile, and cheerful;-no vulgarity, ingratitude, or deception in their character. They are proverbially cleanly, modest ...These girls sing strains on the old subjects, love and war. Their voices are often very mellifluous, their persons graceful, their countenances soft and expressive, their motions and attitudes classically elegant, &c. pp. 355, 358.

Sometimes, these charming, modest, exquisite creatures, it is admitted, when urged on by imprudent and volatile young men,' will carry their pantomimic posture-dances somewhat too far. This, remarks our Author, is very reprehensible in the young and gay; but it is well known, we cannot expect old heads on young shoulders.' As Captain Seely has cried a truce to moralising, we will not inflict upon him any whining cant,' but shall again avail ourselves of Mr. Howison's counter-statement on this subject. Describing a performance of this kind, which he witnessed, he says:

Their voices were disagreeably shrill and loud, and not more melodious than that of a common street ballad-singer; and I could not discover any thing like expression or cadence in the airs which they sung. It will hardly be believed, that there are some Europeans in India

who delight so much in the performance of the nautch girls, that they have them in attendance two or three times a week, and listen to their singing for hours together without interruption. Most people, on first hearing them, are annoyed and distressed by their noise; and in general, it is only after having run the gauntlet of several native concerts, that a person, even without a musical ear, can patiently endure their attempts at harmony. Nevertheless, nautching appears, in some cases, to possess peculiar fascinations. Of these, however, I rejoice to say that I have no perception; and I believe no man can be alive to them, unless he has resided many years in India, and dise carded all European tastes, predilections, and associations'

Foreign Scenes, vol. I. p 192.

Possibly, this last sentence will serve as a key not only to Captain Seely's philo-hindooism, but to the similar representations which we have been too long accustomed to receive from old Indians. Captain S. is frank and explicit; he does not mince matters; and when he cries, Look at home! look at home! Christians and Philanthropists :-in England, you can do good, in India none, and will only produce evil,'—we know what he means, and have no doubt that this is his honest opinion. That he should see no use in teaching women to read or write, and expect no good result from the abolition of suttees, infanticides, and the abominations of Jughernaut or Kali, is quite natural. The wonder is, (and it is not less disgraceful than astonishing,) that the opinions of such men upon such subjects should pass for testimonies and authorities, after they have taken such extraordinary pains to prove, that every moral perception in their minds has become confused, and every virtuous feeling blunted, by a long familiarity with the spectacle of millions abandoned to an infernal idolatry and all the vices which it brings in its train.

With regard to the Author of the present volume, we have not the slightest wish either to impeach his veracity or to impute to him unworthy motives; but he must pardon our pronouncing him utterly incompetent to give any opinion on the subject of the moral state and prospects of India. We do not charge him with wilful misrepresentation, but he has certainly either greatly imposed upon himself, or been grossly misinformed by others. Thus, we find him at page 478, giving insertion to a most impudent fabrication,-a pretended petition of seven Hindoos in the name of one hundred Christian converts, to the late Lord Bishop of Calcutta, humbly soliciting his Lordship's commiseration, in consequence of their having been scandalously deluded by one Dr. Carey. This calumny has been copied apparently from the publication of a certain Mr. John Bowen, of Bridgewater, in 1821, in which he charges the

Serampore Missionaries with demoralizing the virtuous Hindoos. The real nature of this transaction was exposed in the Friend of India, in Dec. 1822; and yet, two years after, we find Captain Seely lending himself to the revival of the same malignant fiction. For the sake of those readers to whom the story may be new, we transcribe the reply that was then given to Mr. Bowen.

But our author has a petition to the Lord Bishop of Calcutta in the name of seven Christian converts, and said to be in behalf of a hundred, complaining "that they are left to depend for a precarious subsistence on the lukewarm generosity and beneficence of strangers.' What will he say, however, when he is told that, although there are mentioned in this petition the names of seven Hindoos, it was neither drawn up nor signed by them! That it is an English petition got up by such friend of missions as himself, who persuaded some of those mentioned to go with it to the Bishop, ignorant as they were of what it really contained, under the expectation that, as the Bishop was a kind man, it might possibly obtain for them a rupee or two. Such was really the case, however, as appears indeed on the very face of the petition, which has not the least appearance of any thing translated from the Bengalee language. Indeed, it contains the grossest falsehood, not only in its general texture, but in the particulars it professes to enumerate, as three of the men whose names are mentioned, were at that very time employed by the Serampore Missionàries, and receiving a monthly salary more than sufficient for the support of their families. These, who are really honest and good men, were quite astonished, when told what the petition actually con tained. They had been induced to go with the person who carried it to the Bishop, under the idea that he, being the "Lord Padre” and a generous man, would probably give them something because they were Christians! If these men were verbally told any thing respecting its contents, they never knew what it really contained; they never saw it in Bengalee, and to it even in English they never affixed their signature!

The whole of this therefore was a manœuvre, worthy of such a friend to missions, an imposition on the credulity of a few simple natives. What indeed could they have made of the following strains of grandiloquence, had they been placed before them in Bengalee, and which our author, to render more emphatic, has given in Italics? Expelled from their cast and expatriated their homes and families, deprived of the countenance and support of those to whom they are allied by the ties of nature, and become objects of contempt and derision to their Hindoo brethren, they now, in this state of humiliation, experience the fallacy of these promises by which they were deluded." Or how could they have comprehended the following?" Con demned like outcasts of society to depend for a precarious subsistence on the lukewarm generosity and beneficence of strangers, to whom shall your petitioners in the overwhelmings of their affliction look up for support and protection, unless to your Lordship, who hath been

selected to fill the highest and most respectable station of the Epis copacy in India?" What did these poor natives know about the highest or the lowest station of the Episcopacy in India? and what of his Lordship's being selected in England to fill its highest seat? What could they make of all these expressions, particularly as they were in English?

The friend who put this hoax upon him, however, has left him quite in the dark about the end of this affair, its most important part; for he adds, "I know not the result of the appeal thus made by these condemned outcasts of Society, nor of the existence of any means by which the Reverend Bishop could mitigate the extensive mischief complained of. The petitioners must continue to writhe under the pangs of lacerated affection, for the fiat of his Lordship cannot restore them to their friends, their families, and their home Though our author knew not of any means existing, by which his Lordship" could mitigate the pangs of lacerated affection under which these condemned outcasts were writhing," however, such means did exist. As all these seven were at that time living com. fortably at their own homes with their wives and families, three of them at Serampore and the other four at Calcutta, a rupee to each, as "buxeesh" from his Lordship, would have obliterated every pang of lacerated affection; of which it is strange that our author should not have been aware, since he has lived in Bengal. This they might possibly have obtained; but his Lordship having the good sense to acquaint the Serampore Missionaries with the business, the writer of this article waited on his Lordship the next day, and acquainted him with the real state of things, when his Lordship observed, that if he had heard nothing further on the business, he should only have given them a rupee or some such thing, as the petition appeared to deserve no further notice; but that as he now knew how the case stood, he should send these petitioners off with a reproof, should they call again. The worthy friend of missions who got up the petition, however, never sent them again; and nothing further has been since heard of this petition-except as it has been circulated in Britain, answering probably the end for which it was created.'

To do justice to Captain Seely, he does not appear to be actuated by any spirit of enmity against the Missionaries; but this is a sorry excuse for his incorrect statements. Their tracts, he says, contain a great deal about faith, grace, reprobation, and many unintelligible terms and meanings, with much vin'dictive and censorious comment. Of these tracts, we venture to say, the Captain knows about as much as he here professes to do of the meaning of the words, faith and grace; otherwise he would never have asserted, that they contain the doctrine of reprobation, which is utterly untrue. He describes the Missionaries, generally, as stubborn,' incredulous," and sanguine in the extreme,' and sometimes uncourteous among those who could have aided their labours,—of which

*the late Mr. Martyn,' it is added, was a proof.' As an instance of credulity, wrong feeling, and reproach,' he cites a passage from the Church Missionary Register, in which a Correspondent states, that he had seen the tears stream down the face of the wretched Sabat as he spoke of the indignities and ' reproaches he had suffered from British Christians." The Author's reason for disbelieving this, is, that a British subject 'would not take the trouble to reproach such contemptible re'probates.' Thus, from the avowed contempt in which native converts are held by British subjects, he infers the improba→ bility of their meeting with insult !! One more passage in this connexion requires notice. Captain Seely expresses his true concern' at meeting with a paragraph in that old and very respectable Review, the Eclectic,' in which the Abbé Dubois is represented as having probably been spirited up to abuse the Bible Society and the Serampore Missionaries, by some of the military gentry of Calcutta. We have since traced the Abbé home to some of his Calcutta authorities; yet, Captain Seely gravely informs us, that the Abbé was one thousand miles distant from Calcutta, and therefore could not have derived his information from such a source! The Qui-hies,' we are told, (and we rejoice to hear it,) have subscribed, most liberally, thousands of rupees to the schools, chapels, and, 'missionaries.' To the Missionaries, however, we must inform our Author, that they have never been called upon to subscribe. Here, again, he seems to have followed Mr. Bowen, who discovers a peculiar antipathy against Missionary collections, or, as he terms them, spiritual letters of marque.'' A little inquiry would have convinced him,' says the Friend of India in reply, that the Serampore Missionaries have never 'been supported by Missionary collections; that, while endea'vouring to do what they could towards spreading Christianity 'in India, or, if he will have it so, towards demoralizing the 'Hindoos, they have supported themselves as really as he bas supported himself while attempting to hold them up to public ' execration; and that they have never appealed to the public 'for aid, either in India or Britain, except to intreat their as'sistance towards objects too heavy to be met by themselves, as the Education of Youth, and the Translation and Printing of the Sacred Scriptures.' If, in subscribing their rupees in aid of these objects, the Calcutta gentry imagine that they are laying the Missionaries under personal obligation, we can only deplore their ignorance. But, adds Captain S., the military have other occupations than entering into religious contro' versies.' How overwhelming and incessant soever their occupations in Calcutta,—and it is sufficiently notorious what a