are taken from them on leaving the palace, by the Resident's chobdar, and sold on the account of Government. Nothing is kept but the silken cords which the King throws round the necks of his visiters at parting, and books, which, as nobody buys them, remain the unmolested property of the presentee.

Still presents are given and received, when such a public mark of respect is thought proper, but in a manner well understood by both parties. If a person of rank is introduced to the King, a tray of shawls is offered, accepted, and put by in store at the Residency. When the great man takes leave, on departing from Lucknow, he offers a similar nuzzur, which the Company supplies, and which is always of rather superior value to that which the King has given. Thus the King gets his own shawls and something more returned to him in due course of circulation, and except that every such interchange of presents costs the Company about five hundred rupees, the whole is reduced to little more than a bow, and the occasion of a fee to his Majesty's chobdars and hurkarus. I was asked if I chose to go through this mock interchange of presents. But I had no authority to draw from the Company's funds the presents which I was to return, nor any desire to encroach on the discretion which is, in such case, exercised by the Resident. I answered, therefore, that, as a clergyman, I could not be supposed to derive honour from the present of fine clothes and costly ornaments, and that I was anxious for nothing so much as the possession of his Majesty's works: this I found was well taken.

I had the usual compliment paid me of an offer to have a fight of animals under my window at breakfast, which I declined. It is a sight that religious persons among the Mussulmans themselves condemn as inhuman, and I did not want to be reckoned less merciful to animals than their own Moullahs. Nor was the King, who is himself pretty well tired of such sights, displeased, I found, that his elephants and rams had a holiday.

The King, to finish my court-days all at once, returned my visit on the Thursday following at the Residency, and was received by the Resident and myself at the head of the stairs, in all points as he received us, and was conducted between us, as before, to the middle of the long breakfast table, and after breakfast I presented him with a copy of the Bible in Arabic, and the prayer book in Hindoostanee, which I had got bound in red velvet, and wrapt up in brocade for the purpose. The morning went off so much like that which had preceded it, that I remember nothing of importance, except that during breakfast he asked me to sit for my portrait to his painter, and that after breakfast he offered me an escort of twenty suwarrs through his territory, of which, in conformity with the principle on which I acted, of declining all VOL. 1.-42

needless parade, I accepted only ten, stating that I found those his Majesty had sent me before quite sufficient.

I lastly met him again, under circumstances perfectly similar, at the Residency on the day of Mr. Ricketts's marriage, at which he had expressed a wish to be present. At this breakfast he was more communicative than he had been, talked about steam-engines, and a new way of propelling ships by a spiral wheel at the bottom of the vessel, which an English engineer in his pay had invented; mentioned different circumstances respecting the earthquake at Shiraz which had been reported to him, but were not named in the Calcutta newspapers, and explained the degree of acquaintance which he showed with English books, by saying he made his aides-de-camp read them to him into Hindoostanee. He was full of a new scheme of authorship or editorship in the form of a Hindoostanee and Arabic Dictionary, which he was pleased to find was likely to be well received at the College of Fort William. Captain Lockitt, indeed, said that it would in all probability be a very useful book, for he had men about him quite competent to do it respectably. He asked so much about my publications, that Mr. Ricketts told me I was bound to offer to send them to him as soon as I returned to Calcutta, and, on my assenting, made a very pretty specch on my behalf. The King said he should receive them with great pleasure, and had no doubt he should get their meaning explained to him. I cannot tell how this may be, but am now bound to make the trial. The marriage ceremony went off very well. The King, his grandson, the minister, &c. remained in the room as spectators, and after it, Mr. Ricketts presented him with a splendid velvet and gold saddle-cloth, and housings. Thus ended, after another embrace, and a promise of returning "one of these days," my intercourse with one of the very few crowned heads I have ever come into contact with. I have been the more particular in describing what passed, because I know my wife will not be uninterested in it, and because this is in fact the most polished and splendid court at present in India. Poor Delhi has quite fallen into decay.

I sate for my portrait to Mr. Home four times.* He has made several portraits of the king, redolent of youth, and radiant with diamonds, and a portrait of Sir E. Paget, which he could not help making a resemblance. He is a very good artist, indeed, for a king of Oude to have got hold of. He is a quiet gentlemanly old man, brother of the celebrated surgeon in London, and came out

*The editor has great pleasure in repeating her obligations to Mr. Home for having, unasked, sent to her a copy of the portrait mentioned in the text; and in adding the expression of the gratification which she has felt on learning that Mr. Ricketts has, at his own expense, transmitted another copy to Calcutta for the bishop's college.

KING OF OUDE.

to practise as a portrait painter at Madras, during Lord Cornwallis's first administration, was invited from thence to Lucknow by Saadut Ali a little before his death, and has since been retained by the King at a fixed salary, to which he adds a little by private practice. His son is a captain in the Company's service, but is now attached to the King of Oude as equerry, and European aidede-camp. Mr. Home would have been a distinguished painter had he remained in Europe, for he has a great deal of taste, and his drawing is very good and rapid; but it has been, of course, a great disadvantage to him to have only his own works to study, and he, probably, finds it necessary to paint in glowing colours to satisfy his royal master.

Of the King's character, and the circumstances which have plunged this country into its present anarchy, I will now detail the outlines of what I have been able to learn. He was, by a very common misfortune attendant on heirs apparent, disliked by his father, Saadut Ali, who had kept him back from all public affairs, and thrown him entirely into the hands of servants. To the first of these circumstances may be ascribed his fondness for literary and philosophical pursuits, to the second the ascendancy which his khânsaman minister has gained over him. Saadut Ali, himself a man of talent and acquirements, fond of business and well qualified for it, but in his latter days unhappily addicted to drunkenness, left him a country with six millions of people, a fertile soil, a most compact frontier, a clear revenue of two millions sterling, and upwards of two millions in ready money in the treasury, with a well regulated system of finance, a peasantry tolerably well contented, no army to maintain except for police and parade, and every thing likely to produce an auspicious reign. Different circumstances, however, soon blighted these golden promises. The principal of these was, perhaps, the young Nawâb's aversion to public business. His education has been merely Asiatic, for Saadut Ali, though he himself spoke English like a native, and very frequently wore the English uniform, had kept his son from all European intercourse and instruction. He was fond, however, as I have observed, of study; and in all points of Oriental philology and philosophy, is really reckoned a learned man, besides having a strong taste for mechanics and chemistry. But these are not the proper or most necessary pursuits of a king, and, in this instance, have rather tended to divert his mind from the duties of his situation, than to serve as graceful ornaments to an active and vigorous intellect. When I add to this, that at one period the chace occupied a considerable part of his time, it will be seen how many points of resemblance occur between him and our own James the First. Like James he is said to be naturally just and kind-hearted, and with all who have access to him he is

extremely popular. No single act of violence or oppression has ever been ascribed to him, or supposed to have been perpetrated with his knowledge, and his errors have been a want of method and economy in his expenses, a want of accessibility to his subjects, a blind confidence in favourites, and, as will be seen, an unfortunate, though not very unnatural, attachment to different points of etiquette and prerogative.

His father's minister, at the time of his death, was Hukeem Mendee, a man of very considerable talents, great hereditary opulence and influence, and to the full as honest and respectable in his public and private conduct as an Eastern Vizier can usually be expected to be. The new sovereign was said not to be very fond of him, but there seemed not the least intention of removing him till his power was undermined, most unfortunately for all parties, by the British themselves.

The then Resident at Lucknow was said to interfere too much in the private affairs of the King, and in the internal and regular administration of the country. The minister would not allow it, and the King was so much irritated by this real, or supposed interference, that he sent, by some of his European servants, the private intelligence to Lord Hastings, of which mention is made in the justificatory memoir of the latter. Lord Hastings readily took up the affair; but in the meantime some of the King's servants, among whom was his khânsaman, worked upon their master's timidity, by representing the danger of coming to an open quarrel with the Resident, the probability that the English would not credit the complaints brought against their own countryman, and urged him to a compromise before it was too late. In consequence, the King retracted the complaint, and ascribed it to the incorrect information and bad advice of the Hukeem Mendee, who was in consequence deprived of many of his principal employments, which were transferred to the present minister, with the general consent of all parties, and with the concurrence of the Hukeem himself, as a man personally acceptable to the sovereign, of pliant and pleasing manners, and not likely to aim at, or obtain more power than it was thought fit to entrust to him. Soon after, however, the new influence succeeded in getting the Hukeem Mendee deprived of one profitable post after another, in stripping him of many of the Zemindarries in his hands, and at length in having him thrown into prison, whence he was only released by the interposition of the British Government. He now lives in great splendour at Futtehghur.

Expecting me to go to Futtehghur, he sent me, through Mr. Williams of Cawnpoor, a very civil invitation to his house, with the assurance that he had an English house-keeper, who knew perfectly well how to do the honours of his establishment to

gentlemen of her own nation. (She is in fact a singular female, who became the wife of one of the Hindoostanee professors at Hertford, now the Hukeem's Dewan, and bears, I believe, a very respectable character.) Hukeem Mendee was too powerful a man to be summarily got rid of, but more violent means were taken with others. One man of high rank was murdered in open day in the city; others were driven out of the country, and every death and every banishment was a fresh occasion of adding a new place, or a new Zemindarrie to the minister's hoard.

While he grew rich, the king grew more and more in debt. No check whatever was given either to the receipt or issue of public money. The favourite had succeeded in getting both the secretaryship and treasurership in his own hands; and all that was known was, that the minister built a magnificent house, and the king lavished great sums in all manner of trinkets, while the troops and public functionaries were without pay, and the peasantry driven to despair by continual fresh exactions. Of the two millions which his father had left, the king had lent one to Lord Hastings to carry on the Nepâl war. For this he was to receive interest, but unfortunately for him, he accepted, instead of all payment, a grant of fresh territory under the Himalaya mountains, which is entirely unproductive, being either savage wilderness, or occupied by a race of mountaineers, who pay no taxes without being compelled, and whom he has not the means of compelling. After a second loan, Lord Hastings encouraged the Vizier to assume the title of King. But the worst consequence of both these loans was, that by laying the British Government under a great obligation to the King, they compelled Lord Hastings to suspend all further urging of the different measures of reform in the administration of justice and the collection of the revenue, which had been begun in Saadut Ali's time, for the benefit of the people of Oude, and which the Hukeem Mendee, while he remained in power, had been gradually introducing, by the suggestion of the British Resident, and after the models afforded in our provinces. The chief of these was the substitution of a regular system of Zemindarrie collectors for the taxes, instead of a number of "fermiers publics," who take them from year to year by a sort of auction, collecting them afterwards in kind or in any way which suits them best, and who, by a strange injustice, are themselves the assessors, and, in many instances, the only accessible court of appeal, as well as the principal persons who derive a profit from the amount collected. This wretched system, it must be owned, is very common throughout the native governments; but, when a sovereign is himself a man of talents and energy, or when his minister has any regard for his own reputation, it has many checks which, in the present case, did not