guilt, their sorrow, or their joy, without recognizing and feeling kindred sympathies in the passions, and hopes, and fears, which attach to us all by reason of our common brotherhood; and no one has read the history of the past aright, or to profit, who, recognizing his share in these, has not learned to distrust himself, and be charitable to his fellows.

ART. IV.-L'Inde Anglaise en 1843.

Par Le Comte Edouard

de Warren, ancien officier au service de Sa Majesté Britannique dans l'Inde. 3 Vols. 12mo. Bruxelles: Melines, Cans, et Compagnie.

THIS is an indescribable book, by a nondescript person: an indescribable book, it being "de omnibus rebus, et quibusdam aliis;" a nondescript person, because we are not only puzzled how to class him-whether as a spy, or a simply honest manbut that we do not know what to call him. He styles himself, with exceeding ecstacy at the opportunity he enjoys of doing so, a Frenchman; but he bears a thoroughly unmistakeable Saxon name; is the son of an Irishman, by a lady of French descent; was born in India, educated in France, and served the King of England in the presidency of Madras. He talks of honour and loyalty, and shows how he understands those terms by urging Russia and France, both or either, to rise and cripple, if not annihilate, England; he does this who has fought, and gallantly fought too, beneath a British banner, and who, if not now receiving a British half-pay, is, at least, and according to his own account, enjoying his otium cum dignitate upon the fortune he realized through his position as a British officer. Then as to his age: he is not a whit less intelligible on this subject than he is upon his genealogy and his morals. We should be inclined to say that, like Louis XIV.'s flattering courtiers, he is "l'age de tout le monde"-everybody's age! He talks, indeed, of being barely one-and-twenty: prattles of his "cœur de vingt ans ; but, two or three years subsequently to this youthful period, we find him at Seringapatam, weeping over the memory of his father, who perished there thirty-five years before! We do not like to throw any doubt upon the assertions of such sensitive persons as military men; but, notwithstanding this reluctance, we cannot help asserting, on our part, that we do experience considerable difficulty in endeavouring to comprehend how a young gentleman of three, or four, or five-and-twenty years of age, could have possibly been deprived of the attentions of his "pére paternel" for so long a period as five-and-thirty years!

Posthumous children are no rarities it is true; but this fact does not at all reconcile us to the idea that Monsieur de Warren's father died ten years before the birth of his own son. If we may at all venture an hypothesis on the matter, we should be inclined to suggest the supposition that Monsieur de Warren is the identical person whom some one, desirous of claiming the honour of a long acquaintance, declared that he had been first introduced to when his father was a boy! This will not explain the age, it is true; but it will serve by way of apology for the confusion. But to continue.

This French officer in the English service is, in the book before us, carrying on a continual struggle between his prejudices and his convictions. His sense of truth compels him, as a man of honour, to do justice to his English brothers in arms, and to express himself in favour of many an act of British policy but he has no sooner patted his favourite with a gentle hand, than a memory of his French readers comes over him, and he proceeds forthwith to the application of a not very gentle foot. He kicks us, in order to please his adopted countrymen. He fondles us, in order to satisfy himself. The result is, that, without much exercise of vanity, we take more credit for his praise than blame. We agree with his conviction, and pity him for his prejudices. If we are ever inclined, as we have been occasionally while reading his amusing work, to take him for a spy, it is his own fault. We really in our hearts believe him to be none. His utmost guilt amounts to this-that he displays much eagerness in endeavouring to make the French people understand that, while serving the English in India, he was by no means forgetful of French interests. Nor, indeed, was he. But in his acts we see more vanity than treachery; he is more simple than traitorous; very ungrateful to the country which rescued him from starvation; desirous of seeing her humiliated; and, indeed, pointing out the way to her humiliation. Ingratitude is a base crime enough; but it does not come within the circle of those crimes, the exercise of which destroys a man's character for ever. There may be an imaginary cause for ingratitude; but there is no excuse for treachery. M. de Warren entertains the former, and thinks he has reason for it. But the whole tenor of his book, from the first page to the closing finis, shows that he is manifestly in the wrong, and that his ingratitude is so without foundation; and yet so unreservedly cherished, that it is, after all, but next in degree even to treachery itself. We first see him, amid his self-chosen compatriots, struggling hard for a position, and struggling in vain. He can find advice, but no employment; counsellors, but not encouragers; friends

to warn him away, but none to help him to stay. The French will not have him; and, finding no hopes of succour or profit in his adopted country, he remembers India, resolves to try his fortune in the land of his birth, and we suddenly see him standing amid the crowd of London, who know him not, with fifteen Napoleons in his pocket, and a bitter hatred of everything English in his heart. France flung him among us, and he is grateful. That we did not immediately put him on his feet, and acknowledge the honour we might have derived from the office, renders him splenetically furious against the boasted but infamous hospitality of poor, suspicious John Bull. We should exceedingly like to know, or rather we can contrive to guess with tolerable accuracy, what the reception of a young English adventurer would be, who should find himself in Paris, with very little money, no friends, and in search of benevolence and a patron. The police would very unceremoniously march him off, between two mounted gens-d'armes, to Boulogne. But England treated M. de Warren with more courtesy. In spite of his being poor and a stranger-two circumstances which clothe a man with suspicion and make him an object to be avoided. in most countries—we did not tumble him like a pauper into the Emerald, and send him, under the auspices of Captain Tune, to his own country. No: England, whether through M. de Warren's own personal energies, which in France were so unsuccessfully exercised, or through friends whom the exercise of those energies may have acquired for him-England found him an occupation: not a very brilliant one, it is true; but still it was helping him to make the first step towards the grand design, and its completion, which haunted his brain. He had resolved upon going to India; and, accordingly, the English friends of this "cœur de dix neuf ans" sent him thither; and he left the Thames in the character of midshipman, in the good merchantship Aurora.

On board this vessel he experienced precisely what a young Englishman would experience in a similar position on board a French vessel; he got, indifferently, well quizzed, and had to endure many a joke at his expense. He intimates that he found neither compassion nor friendship on board, except from a dog, who probably did not laugh at him when he was sea-sick, nor smile when he addressed the dog in a foreign accent. But the words of the sensitive young landsman doing the sailor are entirely contrary to the facts; and by his own confession we find that, however he may have been laughed at when well, he had sympathy enough when touched by serious illness. Fever struck the young foreigner; he was a little neglected at first, but "the

VOL. XVII.-G

brave and good sailor," Captain Owen, no sooner understood his distressing condition, than he was admirably taken care of. "I returned to life (says he). I soon became the favourite of the captain, for people love those whom they have saved. I had my place at his table. I was exempted from all labour, and established in the saloon. Crew and officers alike paid court to me; and, indeed, I was soon spoiled by prosperity, for I had nearly forgotten the only friend I had found in adversity, poor Neptune, the great Newfoundland dog, with his soft eyes, and his good, heavy, caressing paws."

But now renovated, full of hope and health, we find him landed at Madras; and we may understand what his ideas of hospitality are, by the boundless expression of his admiration for the princely reception and the gorgeous treatment which he experienced at the hands of the royal merchants of India. He condescendingly approves of a welcome which would have done honour to a monarch. Had all Madras been his own, he could not have more unreservedly commanded all that it contained, than it was in his power to do while he remained the delighted guest of the traffickers of perfidious Albion. No wonder that he left it with regret, and that he sighed as he entered his palanquin when setting out for Pondicherry. At the latter place he was received by all that was left of his own family in the once French portion of Hindostan. The narrative of this sejour is exquisitely attractive; and we envy the happy fellow who possesses such friends as he found there, and whose hearts were lit up with love for the stranger who was their brother.

Yet as a term must arrive to all things, so did it fall upon the course of enjoyment which M. de Warren so fully shared amid the realities and the memories of Pondicherry. Employment, rather than simple enjoyment, had been his aim; he returned to Madras, made application for permission to purchase into the 55th regiment of the line; and, while awaiting the reply that was to come from the Horse Guards, set off to enjoy the affectionate hospitality of another sister, whose husband, a French officer, was in the service of the Nizam of Hyderabad. The account of his journey to the Nizam's country is exceedingly interesting, displaying, for so young a traveller, no ordinary amount of talent, and a certainly unusual power of observation. Even greater praise may perhaps be given to the historical sketch of the rise and fall of the kingdom of Golconda, made by him while awaiting, in Hyderabad, the answer to the application he had forwarded to London. The episodes respecting French intrigue and French rule in the dominions of the Nizam are full of vigour, instruction, and novelty. M. de Warren has a thorough contempt for

English policy; and if it be not better than the French policy, as revealed by him in its connection with Hyderabad, nothing can be more base, unjust, detestable, and ruinous. We may have our faults, and in India-we must per force acknowledge it-they have been numerous, and with more fortunate issues than they deserved. From the unexpected results of our errors, we have been, in a degree, blinded as to facts, and gained nothing by experience. But no political errors committed by England, and held aloft by M. de Warren to the contempt and execration of the world in general, and of France in particular, ever equalled, in folly, enormity, and vanity, the errors, blunders, and crimes committed by French officials in Hyderabad. Dupleix, Bussy, and Raymand were men whose wisdom, or cunning rather, was strangled by their ignorant vanity. The first-named got possession of the Carnatic by an intrigue so base as to be unworthy even of a French diplomatist; in his character of a French soldier, it was unworthy of him altogether. The two latter were bold men men who had no ability for the offices they had to fill, but who were of undoubted bravery and consummate craftiness. They were drunk with pride, and the sober sagacity of English officials soon overturned all that the intrigues and follies of their French rivals had raised. M. de Warren deplores this, and it is natural that he should. But when, in his impotent and silly anger, he declares that France effected in one year in India what England could with difficulty effect in half a century, we content ourselves by replying that the stubbornness of facts will prove how far the too zealous Anglo-Hibernian-Hindoo-Gallic Count is in error.

We will not pause to ask how it was that, if the conduct of the British Government in India was so marked by treachery as it was said to have been with respect to the affairs of the Nizam, there could have been found French officers willing to take service, and who did take service, in the English ranks. The answer is easily made, though it would take some space to go into a narration of cause and effect. Besides, our readers may profit by consulting this page of Indian history in detail: the sketch of English and French collisions in Hindostan cannot be given, with anything like fairness, to either party, in such narrow bounds as those wherein we are circumscribed by editorial despotism. But though we are unable to give even an outline of events, we may, before passing on again in company with our young French aspirant to a British lieutenancy, produce a croquis of one of the old actors in them. We refer to the once famous Bussy; and our readers will remember, as they look upon it, that it is the representation of one of the greatest, if not the very greatest, of those mixed military-diplomatic agents