iver,--the neatly-painted
palanquins and other vehicles of all sorts and sizes,--the variously-hued
and variously-clad people of all conditions; the fair European, the
black and nearly naked Cooly, the clean-robed and lighter-skinned native
Baboo, the Oriental nobleman with his jewelled turban and kincob vest,
and costly necklace and twisted cummerbund, on a horse fantastically
caparisoned, and followed in barbaric state by a train of attendants
with long, golden-handled punkahs, peacock feather chowries, and golden
chattahs and silver sticks,--present altogether a scene that is
calculated to at once delight and bewilder the traveller, to whom all
the strange objects before him have something of the enchantment and
confusion of an Arabian Night's dream. When he recovers from his
surprise, the first emotion in the breast of an Englishman is a feeling
of national pride. He exults in the recognition of so many glorious
indications of the power of a small and remote nation that has founded a
splendid empire in so strange and vast a land.

When the first impression begins to fade, and he takes a closer view of
the great metropolis of India--and observes what miserable straw huts
are intermingled with magnificent palaces--how much Oriental filth and
squalor and idleness and superstition and poverty and ignorance are
associated with savage splendour, and are brought into immediate and
most incongruous contact with Saxon energy and enterprize and taste and
skill and love of order, and the amazing intelligence of the West in
this nineteenth century--and when familiarity breeds something like
contempt for many things that originally excited a vague and pleasing
wonder--the English traveller in the East is apt to dwell too
exclusively on the worst side of the picture, and to become insensible
to the real interest, and blind to the actual beauty of much of the
scene around him. Extravagant astonishment and admiration, under the
influence of novelty, a strong re-action, and a subsequent feeling of
unreasonable disappointment, seem, in some degree, natural to all men;
but in no other part of the world, and under no other circumstances, is
this peculiarity of our condition more conspicuously displayed than in
the case of Englishmen in India. John Bull, who is always a grumbler
even on his own shores, is sure to become a still more inveterate
grumbler in other countries, and perhaps the climate of Bengal,
producing lassitude and low sp