increased since 1828, by an act of the Colonial Legislature, to which the king's ministers assented, through an incautious application of the principle of leaving local matters to the local legislature. This Constitutional law ought to have been an exception. The supreme authority ought to have dictated a rule, proportioning the members rather to the number of qualified electors than of people generally.

If this were effected there would be some reason in the observation-the French are the more numerous, and therefore ought to be more powerful.

But we dispute the absolute power of the majority. In a sovereign State it is a necessary evil, though there often checked by an upper chamber; in a Colony, it is an evil easily to be avoided. One race must not be permitted to pass laws, unequally or injuriously affecting the other. If the Legislative Council fails in preventing it, it must be defeated by the royal veto.

We have no space for more,* and must leave Lord Durham's Instructions to Sir Robert Peel's exposure of their eminent absurdity.

Let the King's government in Canada, and the judicial administration, be made independent. Let the Legislative Council be made as much as possible independent, and the representation of property, let an even hand be kept between the two races, and the Canadians of French and English origin may be left to manage their own affairs, until the time shall come when, in common with their neighbours, they may throw off the colonial character.

Our space obliges us to curtail much. In contracting the article we have endea voured to dwell principally upon those points of the case which are of more permanent importance, and upon topics which have not occupied so much as others of the able pamphlets and speeches which have been published. We are particularly sorry to be compelled to leave almost unnoticed Lord Aberdeen's Instructions to Lord Amherst, which have been published by the House of Commons while this article was at press. A more clear, honest, masterly production never issued from Downing Street. Lord Glenelg took it for his model, but spoiled it by his tawdry ornaments. We would confidently submit the two to a jury to be struck by Mr. Roebuck.

ART. XI.-Les Euvres de Wali, publiées en Hindoustani: 2e Partie: Traduction et Notes: (The Works of Wali, published in Hindoustani: Part II. Translations and Notes.) Par M. Garcin de Tassy. Paris, 1834-36.

AGAINST Eastern literature generally a strong and well-merited impression exists in Europe, and more particularly in England. We cordially assent to the justice of this prepossession in a very great degree, though not altogether; and if our remarks can at all avail to point out where the error commences, we shall have done much towards dispelling the thick fog of prejudice which obscures what is really brilliant in Oriental literature to our eyes, and towards removing that extraordinary indifference to every thing Eastern which arises in part from our knowledge, but more from our ignorance.

We are not of those who believe that all experience is wrong; that established habits, tastes, and modes of thinking are erroneous in proportion to their diffusion; and that because an individual differs from a whole nation, they ought to become his converts. Such as hold these doctrines may indeed excel their countrymen, but only in ignorance and self-conceit. The relative wisdom, of the single sage, and of his nation, are generally in the proportion of individual to national existence. He may not be aware of the grounds of their opinion; but this is his deficiency, not theirs.

Every effect has a cause; every prejudice or fancy, some, however slight or perverted, foundation in truth. Every error has some portion of reason for its basis, and if we examine it close and candidly we shall elicit a portion of benefit. It is not in candid minds contrariety to fact, but the misapplication of this, that originates the falsehood. Let the test be applied to the Western and Eastern taste.

The literature of Europe is clearly traceable in its origin to the East: the latter bears in its several portions the characteristic marks of its origination. We have at present only to deal with a part of these. In considering in our XXXVth Number, the relics of Ancient Persia, we pointed out distinctly the sources of its florid and defective taste as rising out of a creed that confounded the Creator and the created: that held the visible as a portion of the unseen; the tangible as part of the immaterial; the single and perishing beauties of nature as rays of the One Eternal Infinitude. The Gorgeous was there the Ineffable; the Beautiful, Deity. And as the forms that delighted the senses, though earthly, included Godhead, the words that expressed the former correspondingly shrouded a constant and mystic allusion to Him.

Whatever Europe boasts in superiority of Taste, it owes to Greece, to Homer, and the institutions of Lycurgus. Whether individual or collective, and it is certainly both, the unparalleled strength and tireless energy of that torrent song involved and swept the human heart along its course in unbroken sway; all effort, all energy, all nature in its path, being overwhelmed and borne onward in the one direction of that flood.

The imitative powers that might have rushed on to extravagance in the works of his followers, were checked by the same hand that had introduced the magic rhapsody. The cold and stern institutions of Sparta, rejecting Genius and abhorring Imagination, checked Passion into stone and depressed Fancy with a sneer. Yet the impetus was given: Homer still lived and breathed in the hearts of his countrymen, and Greece but breathed with him: but the infant Hercules of her spirit found a Spartan task-master: the early efforts of exaggeration were fettered by an iron scorn.

Sparta was an isolated state: the simplicity she maintained might influence and morally regulate, but could not bind the genius of Greece. A taste for vigour and conciseness was nevertheless thus originated, for restraint invigorates the powers which positive prohibition enervates. Taught thus to weigh its own fancies, to sit in judgment on itself, or else incur by extravagance the ridicule of vivacious Greece, the poet husbanded his strength, and sought only to imitate nature. She assisted her votary: the very soil of Europe was comparatively unproductive of those objects of sense which lull the imagination of the East; the republican rivalries, the temperature of the skies, induced energy not exhaustion; but, while intellects and interests struggled, the rose was unknown to Greece.

The accidents of rule and climate thus favourable to mental developement in Greece, and subsequently in Europe, were proportionately hostile in the wide sovereignties and glowing luxuriance of Asia. Prohibited from the strong excitement of politics, the subject-slave was virtually prohibited from all; his intellect, chained, left him free only to the pleasures of sense; and the individual despotism of riches and subordinate power was lost in the wide extent of an Eastern Empire, uncontrolled by the superior lord, or by the check of popular jealousy and opinion. Thought was a laborious uselessness, and fancy became sensuous because luxury itself was a necessity: the mind, forbidden to range, contracted itself to the eye, and earth lavished all her charms for the exaggerations of sense; the shade of his chinar was happiness, the streak of the tulip variety, the hyacinth, bloom, the narcissus tenderness; the ripple of the stream was an exertion, and the fountain a dream of delight to the entranced and voluptuous Per

sian, while the light of woman's eye was on his heart and the light of her spirit his sole informing sense. To a mind so unformed, yet so impassioned, Eastern night was a bliss, his garden an Eden, his glittering palace, paradise; the nightingale his voice of love and wail, and his rose of an hundred leaves an aromatic life, her sultry blush but the flushes of a tenderness treasuring, yet breathing back the love he gazed on her again. It was the delirium of rapture unrestrained; entrancing the senses, but enervating and debasing the soul.

It is not the place here to inquire what causes in Arabia originally produced an effect on her literature equally different from that of Greece as of Persia. Since the Hindustanee is but a modern corruption of the Hinduee with the Persian and Arabic languages, having referred to the first of these sources, we must now examine the second, only so far as connected immediately with our subject.

The confidence of a divine inspiration and the weight of the Prophetic character, (taking these merely in their human sense,) had given to the bursts of the Hebrew Poets a loftiness unequalled by the breathings of unassisted nature; and there is more beauty than wildness, force rather than distraction in the Oriental hues that tinge without discolouring, in the irregular glow that imbues without tainting, the bardic evocations of Judah with the imagery of the East. But the strains of the Korann had a far humbler source, in the elaborations of a dreamy and late-educated mind; too imperfect to discover the false taste of Arab composition, and with too much at stake to permit a doubt of its proper perfection. The weariness that results from witnessing hopeless efforts, and the confusion of a mind entangled amongst Hebrew traditions and the base superstition of the Arabian tribes; borrowing yet repudiating the Magian lore, and rivalling yet courting the Christian by a patchwork from his creed: all this mass of vague and monstrous shapelessness the Mahommedan is bound to admire and to imitate. It is the canon alike of his creed and his taste; and departure from either is a sin against both. Crude and debased therefore in its theology, the Korann vitiates while the Old Testament elevates; from that the followers of Mahommed refer the highest emanations to mere sense. It is strange to see a creed apparently resembling our own, (one Christian divine at least has considered it a kindred revelation;) yet debasing religion by sheer absurdities, and, farther, turning it into a bauble plaything for illustrating the sports of fancy and similitudes of beauty: shocking the best and holiest feelings, the noblest as well as the commonest taste, breaking up the sealed

wells of devotional solitude, and leaving its waters as a muddy pool, trampled by every beast of the passing caravan.

It is this style that in a great measure forms the difference between Hindustanee and Hinduee Poetry; the former bringing an ample portion of Mahommedan vitiation into the purity of the native taste, which more than any in Asia assimilates the Hinduee to the English, in simplicity though not in energy. The Hinduee infuses into the Sanscrit or sacred tongue much of this same simplicity, or native taste; but the great poems in the latter language develope the system of Brahminism, a figuratively historical form: we recognize reality under the veil of fiction; a poet's genius moulding the actually past into fable.

The Hinduee and Sanscrit are also excluded beyond a few words for the sake of definition from the present survey: but we take this occasion, nevertheless, to disclaim the silly sophism of a high but worthless authority, that the lays of nations are not their legends: that their mythos is not their history; and that therefore it is hopeless to examine for facts the only documents that are left us, the only ones also that our earliest ancestry could possess or could leave us.

We know not why Herder also should have imagined that Homer cast away the ancient mythology in order to write history. So far from casting away, he preserved that mythology; but the art of writing had entirely changed the system of history. If Cadmus carried some letters into Greece, or even the alphabet, in the time of Moses; if Palamedes added (evidently Eastern) characters to this at the siege of Troy, the one or more narrators of that siege might have known them, or at any rate the immediate followers, reciters, and admirers of the Homeric poems might carefully preserve them: and this either in writing, or by the practice we pointed out in a recent No. (XXXIX. p. 141,) as prevalent among the Arabs, and which at once establishes the practicability, by the practice, of oral preservation.

We affirm, in full confidence of every proof and defiance of opposite and ungrounded assertion, that there is not a Mythos but involves history, not a cloud interposed by poetic Beauty but shrouds and preserves some favoured child of the skies. If reality were not the source of Mythos, what is either, or both? what is the former? what was the last? Invention is not creation of the unknown, but combination of the results of facts and actuality; occurring possibly at distance of time or of place; extrinsic perhaps, but not the less Experiences-Truths, enlarged by fancy, remoteness, and fear.

We appear to have digressed, but this is only in seeming; for