he dead or not? The odds were immediately given and taken for and against. It was proposed to bleed him. Those who had taken the odds the man was dead protested that the use of a lancet would affect the fairness of the bet.* Walpole has a good story of a parson, who, coming into White's on the morning of the earthquake of 1750, and hearing bets laid whether the shock was caused by an earthquake, or the blowing up of powder-mills, went away in horror, protesting they were such an impious set, that he believed, "if the last trump were to sound, they would bet puppet-show against Judgment."

One Mr. Blake betted 1500l. that a man could live twelve hours under water; hired a desperate fellow, and sunk him in a ship by way of experiment. Neither ship nor man reappeared. "Another man and ship are to be tried for their lives," adds Walpole, who is our authority for this story, "instead of Mr. Blake, the assassin."

Play and pleasure have always predominated over politics at White's. At Brookes's, on the contrary, politics, from a very early period in the history of the club, held divided empire with play, or rather the two went on in most harmonious alliance. How the men of that time managed to keep up their killing pace may well puzzle modern milksops. Gibbon tells Lord Sheffield (in Feb. 1772) of Fox preparing himself for the debate on the relief of the clergy from subscription to the Articles, by passing twenty-two hours in the pious exercise of hazard, at a cost of five hundred pounds an hour. We hear of his spending four-and-twenty hours without interruption in the House of Commons, the hazard-room at Brookes's, and at Newmarket, or on the road from one to the other; and of his being the hero of all three. And yet. Fox lived to be fifty-eight, though we are told he had a bad constitution, and indulged in the habitual use of opium. Horace Walpole has left us a picture-which even Lord Holland, from his boyish recollections, is forced to admit has some truth to recommend it-of one of Fox's mornings, about 1783; when Fox, though the undoubted head of his party, was still what would now-a-days be called "a boy" of thirty-four. lodged at this time in St. James's Street, close to his favourite club: As soon as he rose, which was very late, he held a levee of his followers, and of the members of the gaming-club at Brookes's, all his disciples. His bristly black person and shagged breast, quite open, and rarely purified by any ablu

He

It is true, Walpole calls this "a good story made on White's." "Lord Digby is very soon to be married to Miss Fielding. Thousands might have been won in this house (White's), on his Lordship not knowing that such a being existed." (Gilly Williams to George Selwyn, 1763.)

Letter to Sir H. Mann, July 10, 1774.

tions, was wrapped in a foul linen nightgown, and his bushy hair dishevelled. In these cynic weeds, and with epicurean good-humour, did he dictate his politics; and in this school did the heir of the crown attend his lessons, and imbibe them."

was probably the influence of Fox's gifted and beautiful nature which so decidedly determined to Whiggery the principles of Brookes's. From Brookes's radiated that humour which riots in the Rolliad, and which has animated thousands of nowforgotten pasquinades in prose and verse. Tickell, Fitzpatrick, and Sheridan, with George Ellis and Canning,-neither of them as yet anti-Jacobin,--were the most brilliant captains in this light warfare. The Anti-Jacobin was but an imitation of the Rolliad. The imitation,-thanks to "the Rovers," "the Loves of the Triangles," and "the Needy Knife-Grinder,”—is still read while the original is forgotten. But we know of nothing in the Anti-Jacobin more humorous than the testimonials prefixed to the probationary Odes for the Laureateship in the Rolliad; and nothing better in the way of burlesque verse than the odes themselves.

Pitt's personal adherents mustered chiefly at Goostree's Club, in Pall Mall,* of which Pitt himself, in 1780-81, was a habitual frequenter. To this date, also, belong "the Independents;" a club of about forty members of the House of Commons, opponents of the Coalition ministry, whose principle of union was a resolution to take neither place, pension, nor peerage. In a few years, Wilberforce and Bankes were the only ones of the incorruptible forty who were not either peers, pensioners, or placemen. There was gambling at Goostree's, as at all the West-end clubs of this time. Wilberforce describes Pitt as playing with intense and characteristic eagerness. But he soon became sensible of the danger which lurked behind the fascination of cards and dice, and suddenly abandoned both for ever. When Wilberforce came up to London from the university, in 1780 (as he tells us in his memoranda), he belonged to five clubs-Miles and Evans's, Brookes's, Boodle's, White's, and Goostree's. "The first time I was at Brookes's," he adds, "scarcely knowing any one, I joined, from mere shyness, in play at the faro-table, where George Selwyn kept bank. A friend, who knew my inexperience, and regarded me as a

* On the site of the British Institution. The members were about twentyfive in number, and included Pratt (afterwards Lord Camden), Lords Euston, Chatham, Graham, Duncannon, Althorpe, Apsley, G. Cavendish, and Lennox; Messrs. Eliot, St. Andrew St. John, Bridgman (afterwards Lord Bradford), Morris Robinson (afterwards Lord Rokeby), R. Smith (afterwards Lord Carrington), W. Grenville (afterwards Lord Grenville), Pepper Arden (afterwards Lord Alvanley), Mr. Edwards, Mr. Marsham, Mr. Pitt, Mr. Wilberforce, Mr. Bankes, Mr. Thomas Steele, General Smith, Mr. Windham. Life of Wilberforce.

victim decked out for sacrifice, called to me, 'What, Wilberforce, is that you? Selwyn quite resented the interference; and turning to him, said, in his most expressive tone, 'O, sir, don't interrupt Mr. Wilberforce; he could not be better employed. Nothing could be more luxurious than the style of these clubs. Fox, Sheridan, Fitzherbert, and all your leading men, frequented them, and associated upon the easiest terms: you chatted, played at cards, or gambled, as you pleased." But what was the social influence of this club-life? Are we to set off the pleasant chat and unrestrained fun of club dinners and suppers against the mad excitement of drink and play that followed, with the train of resulting evils,-gout, paralysis, embarrassment, ruin, suicide; homes first forsaken, then made wretched, then left desolate? It is not pleasant to dwell on that terrible chain of cause and effect. How changed is all in St. James's Street since those fast and furious days! The dandies still muster in the bow-windows at White's to ogle the passersby, and kill reputations; but the rattle of the dice-box is heard no more in the halls of Raggett; and the hazard-room has ceased to be. The play has subsided to a quiet whist-party of elderly gentlemen, at guinea points and five guineas on the rubber; hazard is not even mentioned in the rules and regulations of the club.

So, too, at Brookes's. How altered now from what it was when Mr. Thynne left the club in disgust, because he had only won 12,000 guineas in two months! The card-room is still lighted up by night during the season. Mr. Banderett, or his representative, still takes his stand by the shaded lamp behind the green curtain, at the desk, from which in old times the counters used to be dealt out,-ammunition for the terrible battle of the hazard-table. But the groom-porter's occupation is gone. Only the grim black-browed face of Charles Fox on the wall of the reception-room down-stairs recalls the history of the past. What merry suppers, rampant orgies, wild bets, colossal winnings and losings, party conclaves, and state secrets, the ears of those quiet neutral-tinted walls have tingled with in days gone by! The Fox club still meets at Brookes's; but that club, its doctrines and its traditions, are of the past. There is a public now more potent than all parties. With the omnipotence of its will can coexist no such empire as a Pitt or a Fox wielded over their followers.

But there still hangs round the old clubs of St. James's Street an odour of other times. The Conservative, with its staring bran-new exterior, and its slap-dash encaustic decoration, is a parvenu, an anachronism, and an anomaly. Let it retreat to Pall Mall among its showy brethren of the hour,

and leave Arthur's and Boodle's and Brookes's and White's to their sober old gentlemanlike exclusiveness,-their traditions of the past, their palæological rules and regulations,—their antediluvian systems of management. These institutions form. the only club-link between our days and those of our grandfathers. For this reason, a notice of them seems to form the fitting close of an article on the London Clubs of the last century. The London Clubs of our own time we hope to make the subject of a future article. We shall have more to say on the social bearings of the club-life we have been describing, when we try to estimate the influence of these associations on our own times. It is impossible to pronounce fairly as to the character of club-influences on either period, unless both generations are brought to account.

ART. IV. ANCIENT INDIA.*

Life in Ancient India. By Mrs. Speir. London: Smith, Elder, and Co., 1856.

Indische Alterthumskunde. Von Christian Lassen. (Indian Archrology.) Bonn: König. Vol. I. 1847; Vol. II. 1849; Vol. III. Part I. 1857.

We adopt Weber's mode of transcription of the Sanskrit letters into Roman, as that which does least violence to the ordinary received powers of the latter, and requires the smallest apparatus of diacritical dots. It is greatly to be desired that some uniform and accurate system should be adopted; and Weber's seems to us greatly superior to Dr. Max Müller's Missionary Alphabet, which, while making no use of the letters c, j, q, x, adopts the unsightly practice of writing k and g in italics to indicate the soft sound of c and j. The only letters employed by us with a power different to that which they have in English are the following:

Vowels and Diphthongs as in Italian; long vowels circumflexed.

ri nearly as in English "merrily," very short; rí as in tree.

e as in Italian città, English church, before all letters alike.

ç nearly like s, or French ch (so written to imply its origin from a k sound).

x like ksh.

t, d, n, a rather duller sound, more in the head, than the simple t, d, n.

m after a vowel, nearly as the French nasal sounds.

h a very slight aspirate.

h after a consonant (kh, gh, ch, jh, th, dh, th, dh, ph, bh) is heard separately, as in Welsh (Rhyl); but sh as in English.

Want of care and consistency in the orthography of Sanskrit names is the only fault with which we have to charge Mrs. Speir. She writes them now according to the loose English method of spelling modern Indian names, and now according to the stricter system introduced on the Continent, apparently in conformity to the source whence she has taken them. And some are strangely misspelt; as Susanaga for Sisunaga (properly Çiçunâga).

Academische Vorlesungen über indische Literaturgeschichte. Von Dr. Albrecht Weber. (University Lectures on the History of Indian Literature.) Berlin: Dümmler, 1852.

Modern Investigations on Ancient India. A Lecture by Professor A. Weber. Translated by Fanny Metcalfe. London: Williams and Norgate.

1857.

Specimens of Old Indian Poetry. By R. T. Griffith. London:

1852.

WHEN India was first opened to the commerce and the investigating spirit of Europe, its inhabitants presented the spectacle of a people of remarkable manual and mechanical ingenuity, and of rare mental subtlety; possessing a highly complex social system, which abounded in artificial restrictions, recommended by no obvious fitness, yet scrupulously observed both by those who reaped their benefits and by those who suffered from their oppression; owning a unique species of hierarchy, and a religion which counted its gods by thousands, and pictured them of grotesque and hideous form, with arms and legs by the dozen; and having a chronology which floundered hopelessly amidst its mundane periods of thousands and millions of years. It was, moreover, a people, by a "peculiar institution" more tyrannous than that of the American States, broken up almost infinitesimally into distinct races, voluntarily debarring themselves from intermarriage and the kindly communion of mutual hospitality, and consigning the noblest opportunities yielded by nature to neglect rather than shake off the yoke of a self-imposed bondage.

Yet a little meditation upon the extraordinary phenomenon here presented, must have convinced a thoughtful observer that India was more than this. The numerous arms which made the figures of their idols hideous, were they not a degenerate way of foreshadowing the universal and simultaneous action of Deity? The three eyes, do they not indicate his omniscience? And if ages of the most grinding despotism of foreign conquerors have not availed to crush out of the Indian character that firmness which even now leads the widow to sacrifice herself on her husband's funeral pile, and prompts the observance of the most vexatious ordinances of caste, may not there have been, when India was free, and there was a cause worth striving for, a highsouled heroism, a battling against evil, which would have secured this nation a place among the greatest in the world?

Nay more. If even the light of Christian truth has often, in its passage through dark ages, been dimmed and nearly extinguished in the foul vapours of superstition and bigotry, how much more likely would be the lesser glimmer of truth and purity, which we may suppose to have enlightened the early Indians,

Z