Bishop's College on the opposite bank, inform the traveller of his approach to the city of palaces. And truly the specimens of AngloBengalese houses which he sees on his right, make him already suspect that Calcutta is not called a city of palaces wrongfully, for the villas that line Garden Reach are, for the most part, if not beautiful, at least imposing, their white walls and pillars forming an agreeable contrast with the green lawns and shrubberies that stretch from them down to the river's bank.

So far all is elegant, nay, picturesque. But India is a land of contrasts, and although so far all is well, it will not do to look deeper into the adjuncts of these merchant-princes' houses. On the bank of the stream, by the very side of the well-kept lawn, all is filth and slime, as the river retires from it with the ebbing tide, worse than filth and slime but too often. From the deck of the vessel may be discerned a bleached corpse perhaps lying on the bank, the crows or the vultures making their morning meal on it, the air giving unmistakeable warning of its condition.

Dwellers on the banks of the Hooghly are obliged to keep a watch for such nuisances,

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and a gardener goes down daily to see if any corpse rests within his master's boundaries, and if so, to push it off the bank again into the river. If it be on the bank of the next garden, although only a few feet from his master's paling, that matters not to him, he has nothing to do with such an " unmannerly corpse," and leaves it to be pushed off by some one else-it is not his business.

CHAPTER VII.

CALCUTTA AND ITS VEHICLES.

THE view of Calcutta itself, as the traveller rounds the reach, and sweeps past Fort William towards the dense mass of houses, is not very imposing, from the level character of the surface, and the distance from the shore of the principal buildings. Past Fort William, I say, but the reader must not, therefore, picture to himself a building like the Tower of London, of stone or brick and mortar, with turrets, embattlements, archways, and gloomy courts. Fort William was built in far other times than the Tower of London-in times when men had discovered that wide ditches and broad earth-mounds were stronger de

fences than stone walls. All that the visitor sees from the river is the green glacis and a few frowning cannon at the embrasures-a broad dry ditch, generally coated richly with greena draw-bridge, a gate-way, and a sentinel. Within the broad earth-works, which are encased in walls, are numerous barracks and officers' quarters-a picturesque church and green esplanades.

The various ghauts or landing-places on the river's bank, attract the observer's notice as he approaches the town, becoming more numerous as he advances. They consist, for the most part, of steps leading down to the water's edge, and terminating above in a paved platform, over which a roof, supported on many pillars, is sometimes reared. On many pillars, say, for in some they are so numerous that as the visitor stands amid them, he naturally asks himself whether it is not a pillar-nursery that surrounds him, the stone plants waiting transplantation to their allotted stations.

I

In these, as in every foreign station where John Bull reigns, the traveller is made painfully conscious that taste is by no means that quality of the mind which the aforesaid John

most strikingly displays. Instead of picturesque cupolas, and strange Hindu columns, which would have well become these landingplaces, and made them points of attraction for the eye in the surrounding scenery, we have orthodox Grecian pillars, supporting orthodox Grecian entablatures. John Bull has evidently heard and believes that Grecian art is beautiful and refined that its proportions are exquisite, and its structures architectural models. All which is true enough. But it does not hence follow, as honest John evidently supposes, that every other species of art must be necessarily grotesque and ugly, or that Grecian buildings are suited for all places and all periods. A Gothic cathedral impresses the visitor with an awe-stricken reverence that a St. Peter's or a St. Paul's, with all its vastness and outward sublimity, altogether fails to produce. And so of other places and other purposes. The best type of Hindu columnand there are Hindu columns by no means. contemptible-supporting the peculiar dome or a series of domes, in which Hindu architecture delights, would have been the appropriate margin to the sacred waters of the