officer, who had rather a good idea of colouring, and was not ashamed to display his talent. "On reaching camp, the scene which presented itself was at once grotesque and novel. No double-poled tent bespoke the army of Bengal, or rows of well-pitched rowties that of the sister presidency; no oriental luxury was here displayed, or even any of the comforts of an European camp (please to mark that, Sir Charles!) "to console the traveller after his hot and weary march; but officers of all ranks couching under a blanket, or Lilliputian tent, to shelter themselves from a meridian sun, with a miserable half-starved cow or pony, the sole beast of burden of the inmate, tied or piqueted in rear, conveying to the mind more the idea of a gipsy bivouac, than of a military encampment. Nothing of the pomp or circumstance of war was here apparent, nor would even the experienced eye have recognised in the little group, that appeared but as a speck on the surface of an extensive plain, a force about to undertake the subjugation of an empire, and to fight its way for 600 miles against climate, privation, and a numerous enemy.”—Snodgrass's Burmese War, pp. 132-9. It may be as well to mention, that this force. about to undertake the subjugation of an empire," consisted of about 1,300 European infantry, 1,000 sepoys, two squadrons of native cavalry, one troop of horse-artillery, and a rocket-troop. For this small force we contrived to carry provisions for fifteen days, on carts; the train was a small one indeed, compared with what is required for an army of twenty or thirty thousand men, but, small as it was, it was the only part of our baggage train which ever incommoded our movements, or caused us trouble. So it will always be found in India; the actual luggage of officers and men is as nothing compared with the depôt of provisions; and yet, how can the latter be dispensed with? But to return to the force in Ava. For the luxuries of the table, the officers on this campaign received the same rations as the private soldier; salt junk, (occasionally varied by a little fresh buffalo!) ship-biscuits, and two drams of rum, drawn daily on indent, from the commissariat stores. This was not simply for a day or two, either; the force left Rangoon on the 12th of February, and did not get into quarters, if such they could be called, at Prome, until the 25th of April; and yet, somehow or other, we got along gaily enough. It would have been most dangerous to attempt such a march, with such equipments, in Hindostan; but fortunately we had delightful weather, and the troops continued remarkably healthy throughout. When you reach Bombay, Sir Charles, ask Sir Willoughby Cotton, if he remembers the time, when he thought a piece of buffalo's flesh a luxury. To be sure it required the teeth of an ogre to masticate it, but it made something like a soup: it was fresh; we got it at first, but seldom, and so it was considered somewhat of a treat! Go to! Sir Charles, go to! In your trip to Emamghur in 1843, you and your aide-de-camp had three camels between you, and you think your self-denial and privation in not having more, worthy of a note of admiration! You had beer and wine too, it seems; however, as you confess and cry shame on yourself for this, we will say no more about it; only, I pray you, not to run away with the idea, that you are going to command an army, whose officers will not readily and cheerfully go hand in hand with you in all things, in hardship, in privations, or in dangers, but I am forgetting our line of baggage. We part, after this passage, as will the majority of our readers, in good humour with Colonel Burlton; but we cannot help wishing that he had turned his experience, which is great, and his talents, which are considerable, to some better account. The importance of the subject deserves something better than a volume of amusing banter: and something better the Excommissary General might easily give us, if he would. - ART. VI. Introduction to the Bengali Language, by the late Rev. W. Yates, D. D. Edited by J. Wenger. WE feel that some explanation is required of our reasons for drawing attention to a language, which does not possess one single prose author of sterling value, which has none of the early national poetry that sometimes compensates for the absence of a more varied literature, and which is spoken by a people, whom the Deen Dayals and Bhawani Sings of Oude, or of Rohilcund, are accustomed to hold in the most supreme and unmitigated contempt. The claims of the Bengali language on our notice are, however, both manifold and indisputable. It is spoken by from twentyfive to thirty millions of inhabitants. The vast plains, in which it is the medium of conversation, are the fairest and richest throughout the length and breadth of the Peninsula. Closely dependant on the parent Sanskrit, it possesses many of the advantages, and few of the blemishes, which characterize that first of Indo-Germanic tongues. Though not without a few dialectical variations, it preserves mainly an unbroken regularity, from the banks of the Subhanrika, to the frontiers of Assam. It is simple in its structure, lucid in its syntax, and vigorous in its expressions, and above all, it is inseparably connected in our mind with those pleasing recollections, which the progress of education, and the first dawning of enlightened opinions in the Lower Provinces, cannot fail to excite. No further apology would therefore seem required for the following detailed notice of the Bengali language and literature. It has frequently been remarked that Bengali more closely resembles Sanskrit than Italian does Latin. We might go further, and almost say that it has altered very little more from the original, than modern Greek has from the language of Thucydides and Plato. Bengali has experienced but a moderate change from the vicissitudes of conquest, and the successive sway of Mussulman or Affghan dynasties. It is true that the influx of Persian and Arabic substantives, into the spoken and even the written dialect, has been very considerable: but the great landmarks of the language have remained fixed aud unalterable. In the simplicity of its syntax, in its observance of many of the laws of euphony, in the preservation unimpaired of those parts of speech which European grammarians term verbs, and which Orientals with more true perception, emphatically term the words of action, in adherence to all that the Sanskrit language had of dignity and clearness, and in abhorrence of a load of grammatical subtleties, Bengali as a written language, has remained to this day unchanged. It has not resulted from the coalition of two broken languages, as modern English from Norman-French and Saxon: it shows no marks of that fusion which invaders, succeeding each other in rapid succession, have given to the Italian: it sprung not, like the polished Urdu, from some great Camp-city, where, for six months in the year, the Amir and the retainer, the peasant and the mercenary soldier, adventurers and pedlars from distant countries, mixed in the intercourse of amusement, of dependance, or of trade. Bengali flows almost entirely from one single source; and, of all the rivulets which rise from that primeval fountain, it most reminds us of the original parent. Whatever may have been the early seat, or the fortunes of that nation, whose laws and literature are contained in the Sanskrit, there is little doubt that they possessed, as a people, many of the essential elements of greatness. With the conservative spirit of their institutions, and the depressing tendency of their social and domestic policies, by which those elements were stifled, we have here nothing to do. But for a right understanding, of the character of the Bengali language, we may be pardoned for a passing reference to that of the Sanskrit. Rich in synonymes, regular in its early formation, with euphony that fell like music on the ear, and combinations that conveyed instantaneously a graphic picture to the eye, of wire-drawn subtlety, of pointed and sententious terseness, diffuse or compact at will, of fertility such as neither fresh discoveries in science, nor all the refinements of the schools, could exhaust, speaking by turns the language of war, of love, and of philosophy, Sanskrit might have descended to posterity, no incorrect image of that ideal perfection, which its ambitious priesthood had vainly arrogated for their chosen offspring. But ample causes were at work to blast the fair promise of its earlier stages. It fell into the hands of men, whose perverse ingenuity delighted to change clearness into obscurity, and to make riddles of plain words. What was already refined became intricate and confused: what was manly and vigorous, was rendered fanciful and puerile. The language well worthy of the Rulers of Hastinapura and Ujayini, became the language of quacks, of dreamers, and of mountebanks. Its melodious euphony was degraded to the formation of endless and unmeaning alliterations: its grammar was loaded with those additional incumbrances, which testify the desire to make knowledge hard of attainment, and worthless, when attained. Thus tricked out and falsified, with a literature unadorned by even a single historical work, it has come down to us as the lasting memorial of the Asiatic intellect, which in the social system, as in the creations of the brain, appears alike incapable of comprehensiveness, of freedom, and of truth. From the above language Bengali has sprung at one step. Its only new invention is a new written character. While the Hindi employs the old Devanagari, the Bengali has devised a new set of symbols, based essentially on the same principles, but different in actual shape. Whether the former fact be an argument to prove the greater independance of the people of Upper India, and the latter demonstrate the more pliant and servile temperament of the dwellers by the Lower Ganges; whether Bengali was devised as a speaking language, because it was either impossible or impolitic to speak in such a one as the Sanskrit, are questions which may be left to the speculative and the curious. But it is worth while to examine how like, and yet how unlike, are the original and the copy. In pure Bengali well nigh every word is pure Sanskrit. Here the final letter has been omitted: there the word itself has undergone some slight change, but is yet easily traceable to the source: here again it is hardly to be recognised, save by the implicit faith, and the unhesitating compliance of the eager philologist. But in the syntax, what a complete, what a salutary revolution! Instead of the complicated declensions of Sanskrit, we have nouns which adapt themselves to a certain ready-made set of affixes, indicative of case, and never subject to variety. Very slight regard is paid to the difference of singular and plural, and but occasionally to the concord of adjectives. English itself is hardly less solicitous, than is the Bengali, about the distinctions of sex in epithets. But if the change is remarkable in nouns, it is something miraculous in the verbs. Sanskrit had shown us some ten conjugations: a couple of thousand roots, ideal in existence, it is true, but still the source of verbs: a common and a proper form of conjugation: number of prepositions, which, when added to the root, increased, modified, or altered, in some way, its original meaning a profusion of tenses as considerable as in Greek: a general uncertainty, so striking as to puzzle the most practised scholar and the profoundest grammarian. By one single stroke of the enchanter's wand all this has vanished. All the subtleties of dictionary makers, all the fine-spun distinctions, all the artificial barriers, which hedged in Sanskrit from the vulgar gaze, and made its acquisition the labour of a life-time, have been entirely swept away. Out of a language the most complicated, the most refined, and the most impregnable, has come forth a spoken tongue, composed essentially of the same substance, and yet the most simple in structure, and the least fettered by created restrictions, of any in the whole range of philology. A short account of the most remarkable peculiarities of Bengali may perhaps be no unfitting introduction to a statement of its exceedingly scanty literature, and to such particulars of its usages and structure, as we have been enabled to gather from intercourse with the native population. In this, we shall endeavour to avoid the minuteness of a lexicographer, and to set forth such an account as may serve to acquaint even un-oriental readers with the main sources of its weakness and its strength. In Orthography, Bengali closely imitates the Sanskrit. It has invented, as before said, a new character, but in the number of letters, vowels or consonants, in the laws of euphony, which regulate their junction and separation, it is essentially one and the same. A nobler model could, indeed, hardly have been found. No anxiety for symmetrical order on the part of the inventor of letters, no desire to express sound by adequate signs, could have devised representatives more luminous and more efficient. The pre-eminence of Sanskrit in this respect is sufficiently proved by the pertinacity with which so many Eastern dialects have appropriated, not the exact form of its letters, but their powers, number, division, and arrangement. The invention of the Sanskrit Cadmus, whoever he may have been, remains to this day unrivalled; and, as recent publications have reminded us, is re-produced with slight alterations in the most distant and opposite regions of India, in the languages of Nepal, and on the borders of Scinde. But in pronunciation Bengali has deteriorated. The clear sounding a, which, in Sanskrit, is considered inherent in every consonant, when no other distinct vowel is expressed, has been transmitted into a dull-sounding o. The consonant or semivowel y is invariably pronounced as j, and the distinction between v and has completely vanished. The effect of this last unauthorised metamorphosis will be readily conceived by every beginner in Bengali, who will be dismayed, at the first outset, by hearing his native Pundit pronounce the word "vowels," the force or which he is endeavouring to explain, as "bowels," and the word "votes," as "boats!" What greater proof is required of degeneracy, and of dulled perception in speech and ear? The rules for nouns and adjectives, cases and concorda, comparative and superlative, are all of the simplest and easiest kind. In the numerals the utmost license seems to have been given to the wanderings of fancy. What in Sanskrit are uniform and regular, have, in common Bengali as in Hindi, become wayward, disorderly and unmeaning. This is in some degree com |