ired.]

It is the future of Baboodom I tremble for. When they wax fat with new
religions, music, painting, Comedie Anglaise, scientific discoveries,
they may kick with those developed legs of theirs, until we shall have
to think that they are something more than a joke, more than a mere
_lusus naturae_, more than a caricature moulded by the accretive and
differentiating impulses of the monad[C] in a moment of wanton
playfulness. The fear is that their tendencies may infect others. The
patent-leather shoes, the silk umbrellas, the ten thousand horse-power
English words and phrases, and the loose shadows of English thought,
which are now so many Aunt Sallies for all the world to fling a jeer
at, might among other races pass into _dummy soldiers_, and from dummy
soldiers into trampling, hope-bestirred crowds, and so on, out of the
province of Ali Baba and into the columns of serious reflection. Mr.
Wordsworth and his friends the Dakhani Brahmans should consider how
painful it would be, when deprived of the consolations of religion, to
be solemnly repressed by the _Pioneer_--to be placed under that
steam-hammer which by the descent of a paragraph can equally crack the
tiniest of jokes and the hardest of political nuts, can suppress
unauthorised inquiry and crush disaffection.

At present the Baboo is merely a grotesque Bracken shadow, but in the
course of geological ages it might harden down into something
palpable. It is this possibility that leads Sir Ashley Eden to advise
the Baboo to revert to its original type; but it is not so easy to
become homogeneous after you have been diluted with the physical
sciences and stirred about by Positivists and missionaries. "I would I
were a protoplastic monad!" may sound very rhythmical, poetical, and
all that; but even for a Baboo the aspiration is not an easy one to
gratify.--ALI BABA.

No. VII

WITH THE RAJA

[September 20, 1879.]

Try not to laugh, Dear Vanity. I know you don't mean anything by it;
but these Indian kings are so sensitive. The other day I was
translating to a young Raja what Val Prinsep had said about him in his
"Purple India"; he had only said that he was a dissipated young ass
and as ugly as a baboon; but the boy was quite hurt and began to cry,
and I had to send for the Political Agent to quiet him and put him to
sleep. When you consider the matter philosophically there is nothing
_per se_ ridiculous in a Raja. Take a hypothetical case: pi