pression
made upon a young Oxonian of high culture and serious religious
feeling by the unmannerly and sometimes vicious dissipation of the
officers' mess in an ill-managed regiment stationed up the country.

Oakfield, a clergyman's son, carefully bred up in Arnold's school of
indifference to dogma and strictness in morals, finds himself
oppressed by the hollow conventionality of religious and social ideas
at home, and sees no prospect of a higher level in the ordinary
English professions. He leaves Oxford abruptly for an Indian
cadetship, and sets out with the hope of finding wider scope for work
and the earnest pursuit of loftier ideals in India. He is intensely
disappointed and disgusted at finding himself, on joining his
regiment, among men who have very slight education and wild manners,
whose talk is coarse, who gamble, fight duels, dislike the country,
and care nothing for the people. The aims and methods of the
Government itself appear to him eminently unsatisfactory, being
chiefly directed towards such grovelling business as revenue
collection, superficial order, and public works, with little or no
concern for the moral elevation of the people. When his friends urge
him to study for the purpose of rising in the service, civil or
military, he asks: 'What then? What if the extra allowances have
really no attraction? I want to know what the life is in which you
think it good to get on. It seems to me that my object in life must be
not so much to get an appointment, or to get on in the world, as to
work, and the only work worth doing in the country is helping to
civilise it.'

We have here the interesting, though not uncommon, case of a youthful
enthusiast transported as if by one leap--for the sea voyage is a
blank interval--from England to the Far East, from a sober and
disciplined home to a loose society, from the centre of ancient peace
and calm study to a semi-barbarous miscellany of races under an
elementary kind of government. Ovid's banishment from Rome to the
shores of the Euxine, to live among rude Roman centurions and subject
Scythians, could have been no greater change, though Ovid and Oakfield
are not comparable otherwise. The sight of a great Hindu fair on the
river bank at Allahabad, as surveyed from the deck of a steamer,
strikes him with that ever-recurrent feeling of a great gulf fixed
between Europeans and natives: 'What an inconceivable separation there
apparently and actually is between us f