ntages of being under ours. The native
governments of the present day are fair specimens of what they have
always been--grinding military despotisms--their whole history is
that of 'Saul has killed his thousands, and David his tens of
thousands'; as if rulers were made merely to slay, and the ruled to
be slain. In politics, as in landscape, ''Tis distance lends
enchantment to the view', and the past might be all _couleur de rose_
in the imaginations of the people were it not represented in these
ill-governed states, where the 'lucky accident' of a good governor is
not to be expected in a century, and where the secret of the
responsibility of ministers to the people is yet undiscovered.[11]

The fortress of Gwalior stands upon a tableland, a mile and a half
long by a quarter of a mile wide, at the north-east end of a small
insulated sandstone hill, running north-east and south-west, and
rising at both ends about three hundred and forty feet above the
level of the plain below. At the base is a kind of glacis, which runs
up at an angle of forty-five from the plain to within fifty, and, in
some places, within twenty feet of the foot of the wall.

The interval is the perpendicular face of the horizontal strata of
the sandstone rock. The glacis is formed of a bed of basalt in all
stages of decomposition, with which this, like the other sandstone
hills of Central India, was once covered, and of the debris and
chippings of the rocks above. The walls are raised a certain uniform
height all round upon the verge of the precipice, and being thus made
to correspond with the edge of the rock, the line is extremely
irregular. They are rudely built of the fine sandstone of the rock on
which they stand, and have some square and some semicircular bastions
of different sizes, few of these raised above the level of the wall
itself.[12] On the eastern face of the rock, between the glacis and
foot of the wall, are cut out, in bold relief, the colossal figures
of men sitting bareheaded under canopies, on each side of a throne or
temple; and, in another place, the colossal figure of a man standing
naked, and facing outward, which I took to be that of Buddha.[l3]

The town of Gwalior extends along the foot of the hill on one side,
and consists of a single street above a mile long. There is a very
beautiful mosque, with one end built by a Muhammad Khan, A.D. 1665,
of the white sandstone of the rock above it. It looks as fresh as if
it had not