and penetrate to the Irrawaddy, to form a junction with the army from Rangoon. But general Morrison's advance from Arracan was rendered impossible by the frightful mortality which broke out in his camp, and by the difficulties attending a movement across the mountains. Rangoon became, therefore, the only base of operations; and a body of less than five thousand men, the only disposable army for the conquest of a great empire.

It was on the 11th of February, 1825, that the second campaign of the war opened with the breaking up of our army from their quarters. Our author's brief sketch of this little band on their advance, has something very picturesque and impressive.

'On reaching camp on the first day's march,' says he, the scene which presented itself was at once grotesque and novel; no double poled tent bespoke the army of Bengal, or rows of well-pitched rowties that of the sister presidency; no Oriental luxury was here displayed, or even any of the comforts of an European camp, to console the traveller after his hot and weary march; but officers, of all ranks, couching under a blanket, or Lilliputian tent, to shelter themselves from a meridian sun, with a miserable, half-starved cow or pony, the sole beast of burden of the inmate, tied or picketed in the rear, conveying to the mind more the idea of a gipsy bivouac, than of a military encampment. Nothing of the pomp or circumstance of war was here apparent; nor would even the experienced eye have recognised in the little group that appeared but as a speck on the surface of an extensive plain, a force about to undertake the subjugation of an empire, and to fight its way for six hundred miles, against climate, privations, and a numerous enemy. At five in the morning the drum beat to arms, and the tawdry camp speedily disappearing, a gallant line alone remained, animated by the finest feeling, and prepared to encounter every difficulty which might present itself. pp. 138, 139.

The bold undertaking of a scheme of such disproportionate conquest, and its undaunted accomplishment, form indeed a spectacle to excite admiration and astonishment; and all the circumstances of the enterprise are of a nature to recal to the imagination the romantic achievements of a Cortez or a Pizarro. Maha Bandoolah, with his army, reduced by losses and desertion to about fifteen thousand men, was now strongly stockaded and entrenched at a place called Donoobew, on one of the branch rivers of the delta of Rangoon, about sixty miles above that place; and here the invaders received the last check in their operations. The water division were repulsed in an attack of the enemy's stockades, and proved too weak in numbers to carry them; and Sir Archibald Campbell, who, with the land column, had already passed on and reached the main stream of the majestic Irrawaddy, at Sarrawah, was compelled to retrograde to general Cotton's support. Bandoolah and his army were now invested in their works at Donoobew by the combined divisions; batteries were raised against their position; and every indication was given of a resolute defence, when, on the 1st of April, the brave leader of the Burmese was

fortunately killed in his lines by one of our rockets. This man had evidently possessed native talents and qualities for martial command, uncultured and stained by cruelty as they were, of no common order; and he had been the sole stay of a sinking cause. With his fall, expired the resolution of his followers; and on the succeeding night, his whole dispirited army silently evacuated their works and fled, leaving behind one hundred and fifty pieces of cannon mounted on the defences. After the death of Bandoolah, the invaders encountered no opposition of moment in their rapid advance to Prome, which they reached on the 25th of April; and at that place, a large city on the Irrawaddy, about two hundred and fifty miles from Rangoon, the British found excellent winter quarters, which the return of the rainy season soon after rendered it necessary to occupy.

Thus terminated our second campaign in Ava; and still, notwithstanding all their heavy losses, the despot and his government had breathed no syllable of peace or submission. Nor, in the defence of the empire, had they been wanting in all the resolution, and a great deal of the skill, which the councils of more civilised states could have adopted in a similar emergency. Wherever it had been found hopeless to encounter the invaders in the field, a well laid and systematic plan had been steadily pursued to obstruct and paralyze their advance. The Burmese leaders, by the terror in which their authority was held by the peasantry, kept all their operations veiled from the invaders in the most impenetrable mystery: the country was every where desolated and fired before them; the population and cattle were driven; provisions and resources were totally destroyed. And all this was done systematically, and with no appearance of panic or haste. Not even Russia (says Major Snodgrass), in her memorable resistance to the armies of Napoleon, could have offered to the invading host such a continued scene of desolation: neither man nor beast escaped the retiring columns; and heaps of ashes, with groups of hungry howling dogs, alone indicated where towns and villages had stood. The unexpected fall of Bandoola, and the rapid advance of the British, amidst the consternation produced in the enemy by that event, alone happily saved the district around Prome from destruction; and that city was already in flames, when our army took possession of it. To this system, justifiable as we must admit it to have been in a war of national defence, were added all the less excusable resources of oriental perfidy; and now began repeated attempts to lull the invaders into security and inaction, and to gain time by hollow, faithless negociations. While, at the same time, every effort was strained by the still obstinate monarch and his ministers, to raise a new and a yet more numerous army, than that which had melted away before the irresistible course of our invasion.

By the end of November, an unwieldy array of seventy thousand men was thus assembled in front of Prome: where, at the close of

the wet season, our army, after every reinforcement, could still muster no larger a field force than five thousand men. There were now present eight British regiments of infantry, whose original numbers alone would have counted up as many thousands: but such had been the ravages of death in their ranks, in a war of eighteen months, infinitely less by the sword than by disease, that these eight European battalions could produce only three thousand bayonets! They numbered to their barbarian foes but as one to twenty, yet were they the eager assailants; and the rains having ended, the third campaign was opened by the British, with a general attack upon the enemy. Again was a total defeat, on the first days of December, inflicted upon this immense host; but again not without the heavy cost on our part of many gallant lives. The route, however, to the capital, was once more open; and now, alternately fighting and negociating, but always advancing, our army vigorously followed up its successes, until the court of Ava was at length terrified into a sincere submission. In this manner, by a continuous march of near three months, our victorious little band had traversed as many hundred miles, and approached within only fifteen leagues, or three days' distance, of Amarapora, before its monarch finally, on the 24th of February 1826, ratified the articles of peace which had been dictated to his envoys.

By this treaty, the king of Ava ceded to the East India Company the provinces of Arracan already conquered by our arms, and, farther south, the coasts of Tavoy, Mergui and Tenasserim; and he also submitted to pay the sum of a crore, or one hundred lacs of rupees-about a million sterling-as an indemnification for the charges of the war. It was stipulated that one quarter of this sum should be paid on the spot, and another instalment to the same amount before our evacuation of Rangoon; and that the remaining half should be discharged in two years. The first certainly, and we believe the second instalment, was duly received:-the remaining half million will probably never be seen.

Such has been the honorable, and therefore the fortunate, termination of this arduous and dangerous war; and judging, as mankind ever judge, from the result only, it may be deemed an advantageous circumstance for the safety of our eastern empire, that we were forced into hostilities, which have humbled an arrogant and ambitious power, and given its barbarous rulers, for the first time, so salutary an impression of our strength. The perilous crisis through which our eastern dominion passed in the operation will be over-looked or forgotten. Whether the severe chastisement which the Burmhan power has received will, however, have made an impression so lasting as to deter its government from all future aggressions, time alone can determine; but there can be no doubt that the possession of Arracan, and the throwing back of our eastern frontier from Bengal to the distant mountains of that country, must tend to the security of our empire. The policy of having

added the more southern maritime conquests of Tavoy and Tenasserim to our already overgrown empire appears to us, we confess, far more problematical. A few commercial advantages can scarcely recompense us for the charge of maintaining those distant and detached possessions, and for the fruitful occasions of a new rupture with our barbarous neighbours, the hazard of which must be much increased by so long a continuity of frontier.

The engrossing interest of the principal subject of Major Snodgrass's volume has so occupied our attention and limits, that we have not been enabled to find room for any of the collateral matter which he has ably blended with his narrative of military operations. But we cannot conclude without observing, that the work is full of the most desirable and amusing information, on the national character and manners of the Burmese, the state and form of their political and civil institutions, and the geographical and commercial features of their country. It is not a little creditable to the intelligence and mental activity of the gallant author, that, in the midst of a contest so harassing, and in the incessant occupation of official duties, he should have found means to accumulate this mass of unprofessional knowledge; and he has thus rendered his little work, independently of its military merits, second only in value for its statistical details to Symes's excellent account of his more peaceful mission to Ava.

ART. XI. Personal Narrative of a Journey from India to England, by Bussorah, Bagdad, the Ruins of Babylon, Curdistan, the Court of Persia, the Western Shore of the Caspian Sea, Astrakhan, Nishney, Novogorod, Moscow, and St. Petersburgh, in the Year 1824. Captain the Hon. George Keppel. Second edition. 8vo. 2 vols. London. Colburn. 1827.

MR. KEPPEL is, we understand, the second son of the Earl of Albemarle, to whom he has affectionately inscribed this his first feat in the fields of literature. In those of war he had already earned distinction, having been present at the battle of Waterloo, when he had scarcely numbered his sixteenth year. After that period, he appears to have served in India, as aide-de-camp to the late Marquis of Hastings; and upon returning to England, instead of taking the common track homeward, by the Cape of Good Hope and St. Helena, he preferred the novelty and perils of the land journey, from the Persian Gulph to St. Petersburgh. We have here the results of such observations as he noted in his progress through the Persian and Russian dominions; and although we cannot congratulate him upon any very important discoveries, or any learned research with respect to the various objects of antiquarian or national interest which he encountered on his way, yet we must admit that his Narrative displays considerable talent, a just and discriminating habit of thinking, and a chivalric spirit of enterprise,

which we are always delighted to see among the prominent characteristics of an English gentleman.

We remark with particular pleasure, that in exploring those countries, whose fate has been predicted, or related, in the sacred writings, Captain Keppel has uniformly pointed out the proofs which still remain in the manners or the ruins of those countries, to attest the wonderful correctness of the divine prophets and historians. Unlike other travellers, whom we might mention, he has despised the mean affectation of that French philosophy, which can tread on consecrated ground with sneering indifference, if not with open blasphemy; and without the slightest tinge of bigotry, he has borne witness in many instances to the execution of some of the most awful decrees of Providence. In this respect his work is highly creditable to his education and habits, as a scholar and a soldier.

Gladly acknowledging thus much, we cannot at the same time refrain from observing, that throughout his journey, Captain Keppel seems to have been in too great a hurry. Naturally anxious, as we know from experience, every Englishman is to get home, after he has satiated his curiosity abroad; yet it betrays a great want of tact to display that anxiety too openly, whenever the traveller chooses to become an author. The reader seldom imagines that instead of criticising, it is really his duty to feel grateful to those, who may be pleased to detail their peregrinations for his instruction and pleasure, after they have returned to their fire sides. He expects something more from the traveller than mere notes; and although the various works which have already shed abundant light on the overland route from India to Europe, might well excuse the absence of more minute details in the volumes before us, yet we cannot but feel that they are in many respects dry and superficial. The style is plain, without any attempts at elegance of narrative, or beauty of description. Little is told us which we had not learned before, and that too from writers who had the rare fortune to blend felicity of diction with profound historical knowledge and fondness for research. In the only part of Captain Keppel's route, in which he deviated from the path usually pursued by English travellers, namely, in that part of it which led him to Bakou, and along the shore of the Caspian Sea to Astrachan, and thence to Moscow, he has been only very recently anticipated by two very intelligent and able writers, Mr. Henderson, and the chevalier Gamba*. These travellers have fully described much more of the peculiarities of that portion of the Russian empire, than Captain Keppel appears even to have noticed. As to the rest, his route from Bussorah to Tabreez has even less of novelty in its details. The uninteresting face of the country, and the unvarying manners of the people inhabiting it, are familiar to most of our readers; and were it not that there is

For reviews of their works, see the M. R., vol. 11., p. 113 and 447.