sions, but of getting at glimpses of the truth, that we have endeavoured to describe two real, compact, and not imaginary villages. To present our readers with a highly seasoned dish would have been easy enough. From the mass of materials now at our disposal, which we have been some time amassing, at some pains, we could, by collection and selection, and by dovetailing and fitting in one bit with another, have made out a pleasing narrative by which Bengal should appear only as the country of untaxed labour and of unlimited wealth. We could have put our finger on estates assessed in 1770 or so, at ridiculously low figures, now changing hands for ten thousands of rupees. We could have gone through large and populous bazars, as we have gone through two rural hamlets, where every other house had reached the dignity of bricks and mortar, where the ground rent was one rupee, and the house rent two rupees a month, where swarms of shop-keepers and Mahajuns imported grain from Patna, hemp from Serajgunge, rice from Nulchitty, brass pots from Calcutta, and piece goods originally from Manchester; and where no one single necessary or luxury of existence, except salt, had paid one anna of taxation to the Company's Exchequer. We could, on the other hand, have chosen some tracts neglected by the official eye, not favoured by nature, tracts on which rack-renting or oppression, or crime, or inundation or pestilence, had set their mark. We could have described a half-cleared grant of land in the Sunderbunds, infested with tigers, ruined by a rise in the tide over a frail embankment, and with a wild population decimated by malaria, or we could have picked out some tracts far removed from European supervision, where the Zemindar was a feudal Baron, and the Ryots were serfs stripped of everything but seed, that would support life and supply the next season's operations, or some locale, where in a collection of miserable hovels some fifty human beings divided their time between thieving and fishing, maddened by musquitoes, infested by snakes, disfigured by cutaneous eruptions, and laid prostrate, at intervals, by fever and spleen. In preference however to crowding peculiarities into one description, or heightening our narrative by ingeniously contrived comparisons, we have simply endeavoured to let the villagers make out their own contrast and tell their own tale, adding such remarks as might illustrate their actual condition. We are perfectly well aware that such enquiries may be based on erroneous data. But we have done all in our power to ensure accuracy. Our results have been obtained not by figures and statements transmitted from one office to another, and filled up by the enquiries of an inquisitive and greedy Mohurrir, attended by an ominous, hungry-looking individual,

with a brass badge and an empty pocket; not by authoritative calls for information which generate suspicion and lead to the concealment of resources; but by unostentatious visits, offhand conversations, and comparison of one version with another. In the actual statistics there may be a few partial errors, for no one knows better than the writer of these pages, how extremely difficult it is to tie the ryot down to any thing like accuracy. Even in the things which most concern him, his looseness of statement as to dates, numbers, and seasons, is perfectly appalling. There are eight or ten mouths to provide for; the cattle in the shed are five or seven; the jumma is of ten or twenty beegahs; the age of a certain individual is forty or fifty or sixty; the land is scattered into half a dozen, seven, eight, ten, or a dozen plots; the original debt to the usurer, incurred only last year, is thirty or forty or fifty rupees. It is only by quiet cross-examination that he will abide by one number or the other. But as far as pains can ensure correctness, we conscientiously believe, that our description of the two villages is full, and as accurate as can well be obtained in this fertile, populous, improving, but untruthful country. In fact, the only merit that we claim is, that our dull and uncoloured truths may be perhaps as remarkable as other men's lively and clever fictions. And we beg our readers to excuse us for the constant repetition of jummas, beegahs, cattle, houses, rupees, and ploughs. It is after all on such things that the hopes and feelings of thousands are unchangeably fixed. It will be admitted, too, that there is nothing particularly favourable in the circumstances of either village. The vicinity of a neighbouring Station causes the disbursement of a few rupees monthly, in the shape of salaries in one village. But this is not more than would happen from the vicinity of a thriving factory, or from the residence of an opulent Zemindar. And several causes which regulate the ebb and flow of wealth and substance, are in these instances wanting. No indigo is sown in the village, except by the ryot, and that for seed, and consequently there have never been made any advances by Indigo Planters. There is not a single pucka house to stand out from the houses of shreds or patches,' and we must hold with the Dacca News, that a pucka house, a dallan, as the Bengalis term it, is one of the objects of a native's dearest hopes. There are here no Brahmins with the rentfree land, which in small patches of less than fifty be egahs, are to be found all over the country, unharmed by the operations of the Resumption Department; neither are there very many individuals who have waxed fat by taking service, or money-making tradesmen or handicraftsmen, such as we have shown to be

flourishing in three or four of the surrounding villages. Not a field is sown with sugar-cane, always a profitable crop. In short, the villages are of the average and nothing more. Yet, we repeat, there are contrasts in them as dark as if we had laboured to create an interest by collecting them with research and comparing them with ingenuity. It is this fondness for bringing things together from distant quarters, and then dressing them up side by side, which has given us pictures of Indian life so admirably calculated to mislead. No doubt there is the germ of truth in all such clever scene-painting. There may be, we are ready to believe, authentic accounts which would bear out several of the striking revelations of Panchkouri Khan. There is a basis of truth in the caricatures of Indian life of all sorts, of which a series has lately appeared in the Household Words. Mr. Slasher of Raneegunge, the Magistrate of Bijnore, the Judge Advocate at the Court-martial, were not pure inventions. But let us look from India, which we do not know, to England which we do know, and conceive what a distorted picture might be drawn by a clever French Feuilletonist, who should bring together every instance of ruffianly outrage by a coal-heaver on his wife that appeared in the reports of the Mansion House, every partial decision by a quorum of magisterial squires against farmers' boys believed to have set snares for pheasants, and every appalling instance of ignorance, vice, and physical and moral degradation, which an energetic city missionary had detected in the Rookery of St. Giles. Would this be a fair picture of our acknowledged civilization?

It is the common life and the inside of two villages which, in all honesty and conscientiousness, we have endeavored to set before such readers as have neither time nor opportunity to visit one themselves, and who may not be wearied out with the sameness of dry details. Of the outside of a Bengal village, every person, who has driven or ridden five miles out of Calcutta, can judge for himself. The exterior aspect, indeed, of rural life, the long line of trees, the rich verdure, the abundant crops, are familiar to all. We all know the feathery date trees, the Barassus with a shock-head like that of an unwashed school-boy, the bamboo growing in sheaves rather than in clusters, the hardy plantain, half vegetable, half tree, which will grow everywhere, the tank covered with the lotus, the enclosures rich with grass of silky feather,' the fruit garden luxuriant but with trees annihilating or injuring each other, and above all, the magnificent old banyan tree, spreading its arms with daughters growing round it, that numbered

BENGAL VILLAGE BIOGRAPHIES.

several rings of its existence, before the Great Company which it will survive had numbered its earliest conquests, and to which relic of a Mohammedan sovereignty,

Rolling, as in sleep,

Low thunders bring the mellow rain
That makes it broad and deep.

It is countless villages, masked by such artificial jungle, that we hope to purify of crime, to deprive of excuse for litigation, and to invite to healthy competition in new or old channels of prosperity. And it is in precisely such villages that reside some hundreds of thousands of our subjects, whose condition, past and present history, and marked peculiarities, we must endeavour to determine with precision, when we would apply the legal or the moral cure.

[NOTE. We have, with the license of reviewers, made no alluThe statistics of Cawnsion to the works prefixed to this article. pore published in 1849 are, like all Mr. Montgomery's reports, completely exhaustive of the subject. After the destruction of all records they must be literally invaluable-for they contain everything which a magistrate, collector, or settlement officer could wish to know. The Statistical Report of the 24-Pergunnahs contains useful information, and the measurements of the survey and the accounts of acre-age, and revenue, are obviously of importance. The Bengali novel-the Play-thing, or the spoilt child of the family is cleverly written in genuine colloquial Bengali, suited to the various characters introduced, and it gives a life-like picture of the education, pursuits and fortunes of a Zemindar. There are some clever sketches too, of Baboos, confidential servants, agents, &c. We commend the work to those who read Bengali; and a work of another kind, Phulmani and Karuna, by Mrs. Mullens, is in its way admirable, and, we are happy to learn, is now published in Urdu.]

ART. VIII.-1. Selections from the Records of the Government of India. Papers on the proposed Railway in Bengal. I. Calcutta, 1853.

2. Correspondence received from the Governor-General of India in Council, relative to Railway undertakings in that country. Ordered by the House of Commons to be printed; 19th July, 1853.

3.

A Copy of the Memorandum laid before the Court of Directors of the East India Company upon Railways in India. Ordered by the House of Commons to be printed; 24th July, 1857.

ORE than thirteen years have now elapsed, since the East Indian Railway Company was provisionally formed in London; nine years since the Company was incorporated by statute; and more than seven years since the experimental line to Burdwan and Raneegunge was commenced. Yet but a very small portion has been made of the Railway, for the construction of which the Company was established, and not a third part of the work, which it was at one time confidently anticipated would have been finished ere now, has been done. There are now in Bengal and the Northwest provinces 265 miles of Railway in working order, including the lengths between the junction at Burdwan and the river Beddiah, near the Adjai, and the distance between Futtypore and Cawnpore, just completed; of the rest much is in an advanced state, but none is ready for traffic. When, therefore, we consider in what a short space of time the greater number of the European and American Railways have been finished, and remember the prospect of speedy completion which the line presented in the year 1855, at which period contracts had been entered into for having 649 miles ready in the year 1857, this result does not appear very satisfactory. But it must be remembered that Railway enterprize in this country, if it has sustained no serious reverse, has not had a career of quite unchequered prosperity; and the circumstances under which the line has been made, account for much of the delay which has occurred. Moreover, we must look on it as no small share of success already obtained, that the Railway, as a commercial speculation, has more than answered expectation, and that proof has already been given that it will be of great use to the Government as a means of administration. "Even if," said Lord Dalhousie in his minute of the 20th of April, 1853, "contrary to the expectation of those