Objections to a gold standard.

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ling, in making the remittances. But it seems to be quite within the limits of possibility, that exchange may rise 4d. or even 6d. on the rupee, when the saving would be £1,000,000 to £1,500,000 per annum, representing a capital of twenty to thirty millions sterling, which in that case would be the loss sustained by the Indian Government in this single item of finance, by the substitution of a gold for the present silver standard.

In the face of such facts and prospects, no Indian Government could reasonably be expected to entertain any proposal for a change to a gold standard. Such a course would be truly suicidal, and most probably terminate in national insolvency and disgrace. It is ever to be borne in mind that India is at the present time relieved of great part of the burden of her tribute to England by the payments being made into the home treasury on account of Indian railways, and is being benefited at the same time by the expenditure of British capital in the construction of these railways. But this is not a lasting source of prosperity. As each year passes, a larger and larger amount will have to be paid back to the British Indian railway shareholders on account of their guaranteed interest. In a few years more the entire capital of the railways will be paid up, from which time there will be no more payments made into the home treasury, and the annual tribute to England will not only have to be paid as before, but be swelled by the full amount of the guaranteed interest payable to Indian railway shareholders resident in Europe. Then will come the real trial of the railway system, as to its effect on the prosperity and finances of India. At the present stage of the experiment, while the capital is being paid up, India receives the double benefit of a reduction of its yearly tribute, and a contribution of English capital for the construction of its railways. But when the tribute is swelled by the interest on railway capital, and the influx of British money into India ceases, will all go on as prosperously as at present? Time will show; but the Indian financier will require to keep this prospect steadily in view, and carefully avoid the dangers that are to be anticipated from any tampering with the standard, by which India would be deprived of the advantage that must otherwise accrue from a rise in the value of silver as compared with gold. In this, as in other cases of difficulty, the honest straightforward policy will be found to be the safest and best. Let the Indian Government continue to pay its obligations honestly in the coin in which they were contracted, and trust to the development of the internal resources of its vast territory, rather than to currency experiments, for the means of doing so. Should a day ever come

when this will be no longer possible, and the finances of India will prove unequal to the burdens laid upon them, England will assuredly come to the rescue, and take upon herself the payment of any hopeless deficit in the revenues of her great dependency. England has already done as much and more for nearly every one of her numerous colonies, for which she has never received a sixpence in return; and shall she do less by her noble Indian Empire, which for nearly a century past has poured millions into her lap, while fighting her battles, extending her dominion, and providing wealth and honours for thousands of her sons?

ART. II.-LIFE IN ANCIENT INDIA.

Life in Ancient India. By Mrs. SPEIR. London: Smith, Elder, & Co. Smith, Taylor, & Co., Bombay; 1856.

A WORK from a lady's pen, on a subject requiring no ordinary depth of knowledge, and yet rivalling the nearly extinct tribe of annuals, as well in its external blazon of pale green and gold as in an interior of dainty type and delicate vignette, is to most people decidedly discouraging. We cannot make out its proper classification; but our fears incline us to suspect that the feminine element of beauty is too predominant in its composition, that the utile' has been too much sacrificed to the dulce.' On the other hand, again, the title bears a fresh and suggestive sound about it, which seems in silent eloquence to appeal for at least a little hearing before being condemned merely for its 'fatal gift of beauty.' But for this plaguy title we had not suffered the discomfort of a moment's indecision. Silently, and on the instant, had our gay stranger been numbered among that class of volumes which the suburban housemaid at home delighteth to honour as drawing-room-table books,-those ingenious productions of binder and printer, which live the painfully accurate radii of the rosewood circle, never moving but at the call of the matutinal duster, never opened but by the desperate hands of some bashful visitor, the victim of an absorbing vacuity. So we do not know what to do with our new book. Ancient India is a

Exterior and interior of the book.

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comparatively virgin field in popular literature: its paths we know not; its flowers we would fain gather. And yet can any good thing come out of gilding ?-any pleasure out of such prettiness? It is with no little misgiving, consequently, that we summon heart of grace, and open Mrs. Speir. Startled to find therein the imprimatur' of so great a name as Horace Hayman Wilson, we no longer dare for a moment question the value of the matter; we even begin to be sanguine in our hopes regarding the manner in which that matter may be conveyed.

Dipping deeper into our authoress, we find of course the orthodox commencement, without which we feel assured no work on India could possibly be introduced to the public. Those 'romantic associations,' where a perfect agony is piled up of such adjectives as glowing,' 'gorgeous,' mysterious,' and that geographical description of the country wherein the Vindhya mountains and the plains of the Ganges play so distinguished a part, hail we not both the one and the other as familiarly as we do the screech of 'Here we are again!' with which the dear old Christmas clown is wont to announce his first somersault into the arena?

With a passing salutation to these old friends, we proceed with our inspection, and gradually the conviction begins to dawn upon us that to very sterling matter Mrs. Speir has brought a style spirited and engaging, and an arrangement simple and perspicuous. Not that the book has any pretensions to originality; but what is far better, it succeeds in giving in very readable form the product of all the discoveries made up to the most recent date by the several successful pilgrims through the dim mysterious twilight of Sanskrit literature. Based upon Professor Lassen's Indische Alterthumskunde,' it has to the general reader attractions decidedly superior to those which any mere translation of that learned work could offer, in the curtailment of many teclinical details and arguments, thereby giving more prominent effect to all that is picturesque and interesting in the story, and at the same time allowing space for the introduction of specimens and translations of the ancient literature of India, the charm of which,' Mrs. Speir adds, has induced some of the first European scholars to devote their lives to its study and elucidation.' Well!-we suppose that for some there must be a great charm about these grim productions of an elder day; yet even in their case we fancy the mysterious attraction lies not so much in the literature itself as in the language which is its vehicle, and which, as the earliest form of the great Indo-Germanic family of tongues, is the daintiest dish

that can possibly be set before those ghouls of the literary world -Philologists.

For ourselves, although we fully allow that Mrs. Speir says what she has to say very agreeably, we cannot help feeling very suspicious on the question if all the enthusiasm be quite genuine, which is so largely lavished in her pages upon the beauties of eastern antiquity. As we infer from some of her own admissions, she is herself ignorant of the language; we are also, from sad experience, painfully aware how utterly even the best translations fail in giving the fresh spirit of any original. Nor are there any writings whose essence is so liable to escape in the process of being reproduced in another tongue, as those which pourtray the patriarchal or heroic manners of a very early age. Witness Pope's pitiable failure in Homer, who succeeds in giving to an English reader about as good an idea of the wily Ithacan, or the Mycenaean king of men, as Addison did of Cato when he introduced him to a discerning British audience in the full-bottomed wig and sword of the period. But not to go farther than Mrs. Speir herself, we repeatedly find in the specimen translations which she brings forward, phrases which certainly, in bald English, inspire us with almost any feeling rather than admiration. Indeed we almost caught ourselves smiling when we found, in page 152, that in the midst of a most pathetic passage, Rama, the hero, proceeds to 'sob like a staggering duck'! Nor could we quite get over the irresistibly comic force of the following naive little appeal to Indra (p. 55):-Thy inebriety is most intense, nevertheless thy acts are most beneficent!'

However, this entire devotion of Mrs. Speir's to her subject has at least one advantage. Just as in a biography we must have a certain amount of hero-worship, without which we feel inclined to quarrel with the author for the cold-blooded lack of admiration he displays towards one whom he has thought worthy of depicting, and whom we wish to be worthy of our study, so the love and veneration which Mrs. Speir lavishes upon her hero, the genius of Ancient India, has the decided merit of carrying the reader along with her. Infected, though in a minor degree, with a like interest, we cannot choose but read,—and, reading, cannot but admire the thornless bouquet thus carefully culled for us from the tangled garden of oriental archæology. Not a jot more will we yield to the deadening spirit of scepticism by which we are beset we scout it from our elbow, and refuse to listen for an instant to the mocking little whisper at our ear, which asks if even our own interest in the subject may not be the result,

less of sincere amusement and honest unreasoning delight than of a willing assent to the dictate of the day, that has said "Thou shalt believe in Sanskrit !'

It

Hence-ungentle monitor!-does not the lady of the book feel raptures, and shall we pause from following her bold flight, or stop to coldly analyse if there be cause sufficient for us to follow? It may be that the Anglo-Saxon, truthful, self-contained, obstinate, and energetic, with his character receiving so distinct an impress from his island-home amid blown seas and storming showers,' may yet have no such marked antipathy as we half conceive him owning towards the pliant, lying, emotionshowing, unaspiring genius of the sunny Indian continent. may be that we are too prone to yield to that feeling, unhappily too common in India, of utter alienation, of total want of sympathy as rulers towards the ruled, which is so vehemently condemned by all who, with the critic eye of passing travellers, have viewed our Indian Empire. At any rate, for the present under Mrs. Speir's banners are we enlisted, and if we cannot acquire a due sympathy towards the modern Hindus, let us at least attempt to divest ourselves of all prejudice towards their ancestors. Let us rather remember that modern philosophy has declared our identity with this despised race; let us forget the grotesque which in the East forms so large a component of the beautiful; let us search out and dwell upon those touches of Nature which make the whole world kin,' and thus may we lend a more reverent and chastened ear to all these quaint snatches of

The still sad music of humanity.'

"Life in Ancient India" naturally falls into the three great divisions laid down by Mrs. Speir. The first deals with India previous to Alexander's conquests; materials for the second are found in the episode of Buddhism; while in the last we again revert to Brahmanical literature, taking up the tale from the point where it had been stopped by the Macedonian inroad.

Book 1 begins by introducing us to the Vedas, or sacred hymns, written in rude and rugged language, and of a date to which the Pentateuch alone is anterior. As might be expected from such isolated antiquity, they contain more of curious information than aught that can be called sublime or beautiful; their value consists in the interesting light which they throw upon the customs and modes of worship adopted by men in the infancy of society. We there find "new settlers surrounded by enemies of a different race, remembering the deities and customs of their