o the learned in that matter,
have been but too frequent in our Eastern colonies; and we do assert
that any single case of that nature is too much by one. Even where the
question is merely one of courtesy to science or to literature, we
complain heavily, not at all of that courtesy, but that by much too
great a preponderance is allowed to the pretensions of foreigners.
Everybody at Calcutta will recollect the invidious distinctions
(invidious upon contrast) paid by a Governor-General some years ago to a
French _savant_, who came to the East as an itinerant botanist and
geologist on the mission of a Parisian society. The Governor was Lord
William Bentinck. His Excellency was a radical, and, being such, could
swallow 'homage' by the gallon, which homage the Frenchman took care to
administer. In reward he was publicly paraded in the _howdah_ of Lady
William Bentinck, and caressed in a way not witnessed before or since.
Now this Frenchman, after visiting the late king of the Sikhs at Lahore,
and receiving every sort of service and hospitality from the English
through a devious route of seven thousand miles (treatment which in
itself we view with pleasure), finally died of liver complaint through
his own obstinacy. By way of honour to his memory, the record of his
three years' wanderings has been made public. What is the expression of
his gratitude to the English? One service he certainly rendered us: he
disabused, if _that_ were possible, the French of their silly and most
ignorant notions as to our British government in India and Ceylon: he
could do no otherwise, for he had himself been astounded at what he saw
as compared with what he had been taught to expect. Thus far he does us
some justice and therefore some service, urged to it by his bitter
contempt of the French credulity wherever England is slandered. But
otherwise he treats with insolence unbounded all our men of science,
though his own name has made little impression anywhere: and, in his
character of traveller he speaks of himself as of one laying the
foundation-stone of any true knowledge with regard to India. In
particular he dismisses with summary contempt the Travels of Bishop
Heber--not very brilliant perhaps, but undoubtedly superior both in
knowledge and in style to his own. Yet this was the man selected for
_feting_ by the English Governor-General; as though courtesy to a
Frenchman could not travel on any line which did not pass through a
mortifying slig