all who have relations in India--that
man will have earned his right to occupy the public ear. For my own
part, I will not lose myself at present, when so much darkness
prevails on many leading questions, in any views too large and
theoretic for our present condition of light. And that I may not be
tempted into doing so, I will proceed without regard to any systematic
order, taking up, exactly as chance or preponderant interest may offer
them, any urgent questions of the hour, before the progress of events
may antiquate them, or time may exhale their flavour. This desultory
and moody want of order has its attractions for many a state of
nervous distraction. Every tenth reader may happen to share in the
distraction, so far as it has an Indian origin. The same deadly
anxiety on behalf of female relatives, separated from their male
protectors in the centre of a howling wilderness, now dedicated as an
altar to the dark Hindoo goddess of murder, may, in the reader also,
as well as in the writer on Indian news, periodically be called on to
submit to the insurmountable aggravation of delay. In such a case,
what is good for one may be good for another. The same inexpressible
terrors, so long as Nena Sahibs and other miscreant sons of hell are
roaming through the infinite darkness, may prompt the same fretfulness
of spirit; the same deadly irritation and restlessness, which cannot
but sharpen the vision of fear, will sharpen also that of watching
hope, and will continually read elements of consolation or trust in
that which to the uninterested eye offers only a barren blank.

EUROPEANS.

I am not sorry that the first topic, which chance brings uppermost, is
one which overflows with the wrath of inexhaustible disgust. What
fiend of foolishness has suggested to our absurd kinsmen in the East,
through the last sixty years, to generalise themselves under the name
of _Europeans_? As if they were ashamed of their British connections,
and precisely at that moment when they are leaving England, they begin
to assume continental airs; when bidding farewell to Europe, they
begin to style themselves _Europeans_, as if it were a greater thing
to take up a visionary connection with the Continent, than to found a
true and indestructible nobility upon their relationship to the one
immortal island of this planet. There is no known spot of earth which
has exerted upon the rest of the planet one-thousandth part of the
influence which this nobl