th, is such as is written only by men of
large calibre and high culture. No words are wasted. The narrative flows
calmly and powerfully along, like a geometrical demonstration, omitting
nothing which is significant, admitting nothing which is irrelevant,
glowing with all the warmth of rich imagination and sympathetic genius,
yet never allowing any overt manifestation of feeling, ever concealing
the author's personality beneath the unswerving exposition of the
subject-matter. That highest art, which conceals art, Mr. Hunter appears
to have learned well. With him, the curtain is the picture.

Such a style as this would suffice to make any book interesting, in
spite of the remoteness of the subject. But the "Annals of Rural
Bengal" do not concern us so remotely as one might at first imagine.
The phenomena of the moral and industrial growth or stagnation of a
highly-endowed people must ever possess the interest of fascination for
those who take heed of the maxim that "history is philosophy teaching
by example." National prosperity depends upon circumstances sufficiently
general to make the experience of one country of great value to another,
though ignorant Bourbon dynasties and Rump Congresses refuse to learn
the lesson. It is of the intimate every-day life of rural Bengal that
Mr. Hunter treats. He does not, like old historians, try our patience
with a bead-roll of names that have earned no just title to remembrance,
or dazzle us with a bountiful display of "barbaric pearls and gold," or
lead us in the gondolas of Buddhist kings down sacred rivers, amid
"a summer fanned with spice"; but he describes the labours and the
sufferings, the mishaps and the good fortune, of thirty millions of
people, who, however dusky may be their hue, tanned by the tropical suns
of fifty centuries, are nevertheless members of the imperial Aryan race,
descended from the cool highlands eastward of the Caspian, where, long
before the beginning of recorded history, their ancestors and those of
the Anglo-American were indistinguishably united in the same primitive
community.

The narrative portion of the present volume is concerned mainly with
the social and economical disorganization wrought by the great famine
of 1770, and with the attempts of the English government to remedy the
same. The remainder of the book is occupied with inquiries into the
ethnic character of the population of Bengal, and particularly with an
exposition of the peculiariti