Here again the scene is in Western India, among the
Marathas; but the period belongs to the first quarter of this century.
It purports to be a free translation from a manuscript given to the
author by a Hindu who had in his youth served with the Maratha armies,
and latterly fell in with the Pindaree hordes, from whom he heard
tales of their plundering raids. He eventually joins a band of
robbers, and leads a wandering, adventurous life in the hills and
jungles of the Dekhan, until the general pacification of the country
by the British permits or obliges him to settle down quietly. The
merit of the book consists entirely in its precise and valuable
delineation of the condition of the country when it was harried by the
freebooting Maratha companies, and in certain glimpses which are
given of Anglo-Indian life in those rough days; for the writer, unlike
Meadows Taylor, has no literary power, and can only relate accurately
what he has seen or has carefully gathered from authentic sources.

We have thus only two novels worth mention which have preserved true
pictures of the times before all the wild irregularity of Indian
circumstance and rulership had been flattened down under the
irresistible pressure of English law and order. The historical romance
has shared the general decline and fall of that school in Europe;
while as for the exact reproduction of stories dealing entirely with
native life, very few Anglo-Indians would now attempt it, for such a
book would find very scanty favour in England. Nearly all recent
Indian novels have for their subject, not native, but Anglo-Indian
society; the heroes and heroines, in war or love, in peril or pastime,
are English; the natives take the minor or accessory part in the
drama, and give the prevailing colour, tragical or comical, to the
background. One of the best and earliest novels of this class is
_Oakfield_, written about 1853 by William Arnold, a son of Dr. Arnold
of Rugby, who, after spending some years in one of the East India
Company's sepoy regiments, obtained a civil appointment in India, and
died at Gibraltar on his way homeward. Some pathetic lines in the
short poem by Matthew Arnold called _A Southern Night_ commemorate his
untimely death. The book is remarkable for the autobiographic
description, too austere and censorious, of life in Indian
cantonments, or during an Indian campaign, before the great Mutiny
swept away the old sepoy army of Bengal. It represents the im