perhaps be worth while to glance at the various amount of land revenue derived from the twenty-five Regulation districts in which the Bengali language is wholly or even partially spoken. In a table which we submit below, we have been guided by such published documents as were within our reach, and in some cases have been enabled to compare the returns of more than one year, taking the common average as the standard. In others again we have been unfortunately restricted to the returns of a single twelvemonth. But we believe that our statistics will be found tolerably correct, within a few thousands, and if anything, under the mark. In alphabetical order the districts pay land revenue as follows:

For a view of the comparative fertility of the several Bengal districts, the above is tolerably accurate and sufficient for all practical purposes. The table wants the detail of hundreds and even of thousands, and it may be that half a lakh might be added to some districts, as the revenue arising from Khass and resumed Mahals, lately settled, the exact amount of which we

have not the means of estimating. Several points also require a little explanation, in order to relieve whole districts from the charge of sterility. Burdwan, it will be seen, stands at the head of the list, distancing all its competitors in the great race. This district is remarkable as the birth-place of Puttani Talúks, and the immense revenues of its wealthy Raja are got in with safety and expedition under the above arrangement. With two other districts, those of Midnapore and Chittagong, it was almost the first land that came into our possession, at an epoch five years anterior to the memorable 12th of August, 1765. We are thus naturally anxious to see how its colleagues have fared, and while twenty lakhs may well be afforded by the immense extent of country included in Midnapore, one of our largest zillas, Chittagong only contibutes a little more than seven. The hills of this district are still clothed in their primitive verdure. This is one of those where a long series of toils may yet employ the axe of the woodsman and the plough of the Ryot, and yet from a variety of causes, its revenue establishment is perhaps the most expensive in the whole of India. But the twenty-four Pergunnahs came under our rule even before the other three, and the goodly amount of their revenue may serve to explain in some measure the paucity of the Baraset contributions, which are in a great measure paid in to the collectorate at Alipore. The same excuse may be pleaded for Furridpore and Pubna, districts only lately apportioned, whose civil and financial matters are mainly settled in the courts of their neighbouring districts. On the whole then it may be assumed that ten or at most eleven lakhs is a fair average of land revenue for districts fully as large as the county of Devon, and sometimes almost equal to all the Ridings of Yorkshire combined. It can hardly be said that the Zemindars are heavily assessed, or that they are compelled to exact extra cesses from their tenants with even more than the license of old feudal landlords. With the supreme landlord too, for the Government has made itself nothing less, the barriers are fixed, broad and deep, and for ever. Let deserts be turned into rice fields. Let the timber of the forest fall, and its underwood cease to spring up, let jhíls and swamps be dried, and rivers inundate only to fertilize, the Government will hardly add a direct Rupee to its revenue. Whatever improvements take place by natural changes or through the energy of man, agriculture and the land-owner alone will benefit. The Decennial settlement was made Perennial in the sanguine but fallacious hope that Zemindars would set to work in earnest, and bestow all their energies on the improvement of the land. Re

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sumptions and their unmerited obloquy are by this time terminated, and even those creations which we may expect from the magic influence of Bengal's hundred streams, will, in conformity to a late equitable enactment, be subjected to scrutiny only once in ten years. We reserve any further remarks on the operation of the revenue laws as inconsistent with the limits of the present paper. But no one who has ever studied the subject will at all complain that the rice crops of Bengal are over-assessed, or that we have been at any time liable as a governing power, to the reproach which might well have been indignantly vented against the invading Roman general," where they have made a solitude, they give it the name of peace.' Our stringency in the Revenue Regulations relates to the exacting of the Revenue fixed by law, and not to the steps by which that Revenue was fixed in the first instance. We have made no deserts. We have not driven away a teeming population from its dwelling places, or cleared out villages by wholesale. If a mistake was made and too much demanded, the collector's hammer fell with its wonted regularity, and the estate was soon subjected to a lower assessment. Things thus found their level in a very short period of time, and even when an estate was put up for sale, it would often be found that the exactions or carelessness of a landlord, or the rapacity of his agents, or the mysterious and unforeseen operations of disease, inundation, and famine had combined to recall the desert for a time, with its noxious animals or malaria more noxious still.

In surveying the plains of Bengal we may be excused for looking with something of an antiquarian spirit for peculiarities of names as indicative of the age. And here again we have Hinduism vividly stamped on the face of the land. As the very names of his sons and his daughters are borrowed from the Deities he adores, so are the appellations of the villages in which the Hindu lives. There is not a district in all Bengal which has not by dozens its cities of Bhawani, Kali, Durga and Krishna. Sometimes we have indications of a divided empire between Church and State, the priestly power in contradistinction to the kingly. In the south of England it is usual to hear a common ending diversified by the prefixes of "King's" or "Abbott's,' each indicative of their respective origin and belongings, and so in Bengal we have everywhere the Rajahat, and the Bamanhat, or the bazar of the Zemindar and that of the Brahman. All this and much more besides is unmixed Hindusim. Often however we have the surface broken by the introduction of Mussulman names, or by their intermarriage with the pure

Sanskrit vocables, and by those rude local denominations in which the peasantry of every country are wont to indulge. The result is that in ten miles of a district we have a strange combination of names. First we meet with Kanchannagar, the city of gold, Dharmapur, the city of justice, pure and untainted Sanskrit. Then we find Alinagur, the exalted city, Mirzanagur, Sultanpur and Khanpur, cities of Mussulman dignitaries, the Persian prefix illegally married to the Hindu termination; and lastly uncouth appellations, apparently indicative of local peculiarities of climate or situation or incident. These points, trivial in themselves, are yet forced on our observation by their very frequency, and they serve to remind us in due order, of the great spread of the Sanskrit language, the Hindu religion, and the race by whom both language and religion were preserved. Next they recall to us the Mussulman tide of invasion which broke up forcibly the old barriers of the language and gave us, in the Upper Provinces, the flexible and polished Urdu for the harsh and unpolished Hindi, and the Lower Ganges, the modern form of Bengali for that which depended solely on the Sanskrit: and lastly they tell us that in every country there are to be found certain quaint and rustic appellations which find themselves a resting place in the teeth of any language, adventitious or indigenous. Historical inquiry will not disdain the light thrown by peculiarities such as the above, provided that antiquarianism be set down in its proper place, as one of those tabulæ naufragii which may serve to rescue facts from the deluge of time. Even if not useful, the study of Bengali names could hardly fail to be amusing, were the amusement no other than that produced by the perusal of Captain Marryatt's tour in America, where that amusing writer gravely enumerates how, in the backwoods, he found so many places of the name of Syracuse, so many of the name of great mud, so many named Athens, so many little muds, so many Romes, and so many "muddies.”

It was on the banks of the great Ganges, whose fertilizing and destructive powers, we have been endeavouring to describe, that the most ribald writer of a sceptical age placed the genuine abode of moral purity and truth. Nothing in Europe, in Western civilization, or in the consolidated benefits of discipline and law, could satisfy the longings of that untameable spirit. In a series of tales nearly all devoted to Asiatic subjects and many to India in particular, he sent forth his fiery shafts to destroy, scathe or wound, everything either venerable in Western institutions or hallowed by a belief in its divine origin. No weapon

in the great armoury of ridicule from the most brilliant and elevated wit to the most coarse and nauseous buffoonery, of which his variously-gifted nature was not thoroughly master; and no error so absurd, no mistake so degrading to that wisdom which glories in its own far-sightedness, by which his infidel reason was not led blindly captive. We read in the tales of Voltaire of Brahmans deploring their own ignorance, of young Hindu maidens conjugating their first Italian verb with their confiding lovers, where heart answered to heart in simplicity, and of the happy land of the Gangarides whose shepherds are all equal, whose places are renowned in Eastern and Western marts; and where a population of peaceful inhabitants assemble for religious ceremonies in temples built of cedar wood, on the days of the full moon! We read the above and much more, told too, in a style at once so graphic and captivating as almost to make us forget the absurdities it conveys. But we turn to the living picture and the illusion, if ever it charmed for a moment, is dispelled at once. We survey the plains of the Lower Ganges, their magnificent revenue, their luxuriant vegetation, their productiveness which almost defies the drenching rain and the blazing sun, their wonders in the animal creation, the gorgeous varieties of their feathered races, their thousand streams never failing in contributions to the daily food of millions, their teeming population, their language and religion as little altered by the lapse of ages as the nature of things will possibly admit, and we are forced to confess that only man is vile." We shall scarcely be required to prove the moral degradation of the Bengal Ryot, and we therefore propose closing our paper with a few observations on his present condition and ways of dealing.

The vices of the Bengali are but too well known. His good qualities are patient endurance, suppleness, dexterity, and quickness of apprehension. But though it may be assumed that the grosser forms of vice which we have been so often warned not to take as samples of the nation at large, and which prevail in the suburbs of large towns and the purlieus of our courts, are not found in the villages with their artificial jungle, yet it must not be supposed that the latter places are the abode of rustic simplicity and manliness. Bad and low passions are as rife where law has never been as where it is daily perverted to a means of fraud or oppression. The curse of ignorance as to man's proper rights, and a demoralizing disobedience to lawful authority, are more prominent in a village on the very outskirts of a district, than in those next the great bazar where the sudder

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