the least to be relied on: if that were all a man had before him to enable him to form his judgment, few Thugs would have been punished before the trials come on, the approvers have all been brought together; have had opportunities of seeing the prisoners, and of fabricating what tales they please. But this they dare not do; they know well that what passes in the sessions, though the actual trial, yet serves chiefly to inspect the papers and operations of the subordinate officers, in order to ascertain that all has been correctly couducted; and that in reality, the previous proceedings form the evidence mainly relied upon. The whole association of Thugs is, in fact, different from that of any other known villains in existence. Their system is such, that they are beyond the reach of the ordinary tribunals of the country, and a special system must be put in force against them. That some petty abuses have been committed, we allow. Money has occasionally been extorted from people, under threat of accusing them of being Thugs; and others, though innocent, have suffered a temporary imprisonment. But there is no system, however well organized, that may not be open to imperfections; and what are such evils as the above, which are the sum total of all that has occurred, to ridding the world of some hundreds of professed assassins. We are fully convinced, after taking every thing into consideration, that there are no trials in which a man may with so safe a conscience pronounce sentence, as those of the Thugs; in proof of which we have only to refer to the table in p. S8 of Captain Sleeman's work. No less than eleven different functionaries, judicial and political, are there mentioned as having held Thug trials; yet the general result is the same in all, as to the proportion found guilty and acquitted. We could mention many individual instances in proof of the correctness of the information obtained and evidence brought forward, but will content ourselves with one very striking case from Hyderabad. About eighty Thugs had been arrested in various parts of that kingdom by different parties of our approvers; they were collected into a gang and sent off to Jubulpoor under a guard. As they were passing the residence of the local governor of one of the Hyderabad provinces, he gave in charge to the guard eleven men whom he had apprehended on suspicion. The whole were safely brought to Jubulpoor; but it so happened that the papers and documents relating to their arrest had not been received by the time of their arrival; and the officer commanding the guard made no report as to whence the different men who composed the gang under his charge had been received: they were, therefore, as a matter of course, supposed to be all Thugs who had been arrested by our approvers. Nevertheless the usual form was proceeded in, i. e. the approvers who remained at Jubulpoor were sent for singly to inspect the gang: all were recognized to be Thugs excepting eleven men, of whom the approvers said they knew nothing. On the receipt of the documents a few days afterwards, these eleven proved to be the party given in charge to the guard by the local governor, with whose arrest our approvers had no concern. The success which has attended the exertions of the officers employed to suppress this crime, has hitherto equalled our most sanguine expectations. In most parts of Central India, Bundlecund, Bogelcund, and from Allahabad to the Himalayah, Thugghee now scarcely exists: the great proof of which is, that the servants of English gentlemen, and Sepahees, who go on leave into those parts of the country, have, during the last three years, all returned in safety; whereas previously, not a year passed without many of them being missed. We mention these two classes, for their movements only can we correctly ascertain; but it is a fair inference that other natives have travelled in equal safety. There can be no doubt that if the British government will pursue vigorous measures for a few years, the system will, with proper supervision on the part of the ordinary police, be completely eradicated, never again to arise; but if exertions are slackened, and any fully initiated Thugs left at large, they would infallibly raise new gangs, and Thugghee would again flourish all over India. It is certainly incumbent on a government which assumes to itself the character of enlightened, and which is now paramount in India, to exert itself for the suppression of such an atrocious system. It is impossible to ascertain with accuracy the extent to which it has been carried annually, and, could it be done, the statement would scarcely be credited. Reckoning the number of Thugs in all India to be ten thousand, and that, on the average, each Thug murders three victims a year, this will give an amount of thirty thousand murders annually committed for many years past, of which, till lately, scarcely any thing was known. Frightfully enormous as this may appear, it is probable that both estimates are under the mark, which is warranted by what appears on the trials, where, of course, but a small portion of the crimes actually committed are proved. "These men are commonly tried for one particular case of murder, perpetrated on one occasion, in which case all the gang may have participated, and of which the evidence is most complete. On the average, more than ten of these cases have been found to occur on every expedition; and every man has, on the average, been on ten of these expeditions. The murders for which they are tried are not, therefore, commonly more than a hundredth part of the murders they have perpetrated in the course of their career of crime. In the last sessions held at Jubulpoor by Mr. Smith, for 1834-5, thirty-six cases from Hyderabad, committed by Captain Reynolds, and forty-two cases from other parts, committed by myself, were tried, and two hundred and six prisoners convicted of the murder of four hundred and forty persons. Of these the bodies of three hundred and ninety had been disinterred, and inquests held over them, leaving only fifty unaccounted for."--p. 38. In the sessions of 1836, lately held by the Honourable F. I. Shore at Jubulpoor, two hundred and forty-one prisoners were convicted of the murder of four hundred and seventy-four individuals, of whose corpses three hundred and fourteen were disinterred, and inquests held upon them. * The results have been hitherto highly satisfactory. Within these few years more than two thousand Thugs have been arrested by the officers attached to the Jubulpoor and Central India establishment alone. Of these about three hundred have been made approvers; taking in the sessions of 18S6 first mentioned, the abstract of which is not included in the table at p. 38 of Captain Sleeman's book, which was printed just before the sessions were held, eighteen hundred and three were committed for trial. Of these four hundred and nineteen were sentenced to death; one thousand and eighty to transportation for life; ninety-five to imprisonment for life; leaving two hundred and nine, who were either sentenced to limited imprisonment, allowed to turn. approvers, died in gaol, or were otherwise disposed of. Only twenty-one of the whole have been acquitted; and this proves the extraordinary care with which the cases are prepared by the officers to whom this duty has been intrusted, and the strong nature of the evidence adduced. We cannot but wish them every success in exterminating a system which spares neither sex nor age; whose members never abandon their profession as long as they possess the power to engage in an expedition; who watch for their prey like wild beasts or vultures; and talk of the principal scenes of their crimes as a sportsman would of his favourite We trust also that no miserable fit of economy on preserves. the part of government may arise to thwart the measures in progress, but that every co-operation will be given to those praiseworthy exertions. These sentences are at once carried into execution, and not commuted, as is so common in England. ART. II.-1. Ida della Torre, Episodio patrio, di Giulio Carcano. (Ida della Torre, a national episode by Giulio Carcano.) 8vo. Milano, 1834. 2. L'Esule Pisano, Canti Tre, di Gio. Battista Montanari. (The Exile of Pisa, in Three Cantos, by Gio. Battista Montanari.) 8vo. Verona. 1886. 3. Ulrico e Lida, Novella, di Tommaso Grossi. 8vo. Milano. 1837. NARRATIVE poetry appears to be reviving in Italy, though not in its earliest modern form; neither as the regular epic of Tasso, nor the fantastically wild, extravagant, and comic, but always vigorous and fascinating, vein of Ariosto. As little have the living successors of those great bards condescended to imitate the romantic strain of Scott, although we can scarcely doubt of The Lay, Marmion, The Lord of the Isles, &c. being as certainly the progenitors of the more recent Italian narrative poems, as the Waverley series of their historic novels; with some of which we have made our readers acquainted. The works, however, where with our present business lies, have, as intimated, neither the regularity and completeness of the first-named poet, the life and variety of the second, nor the strong and romantic spirit of the last. But if it is easy to say what they are not, what they are is less readily definable; inasmuch as even those now before us differ too widely from each other to be susceptible of any generic or collective description beyond that of narrative, written in the regular ottava rima, or eight-lined stanza. Their classification however is of the less importance because we have not hitherto met with one of them of merit sufficient to point out its author as the founder of a new school, though evidently gifted with some poetic powers. The three poems before us we understand to be very popular in Italy, and therefore purpose laying them before our readers in the chronological order of their publication. The first of the three, Ida della Torre, bears as a poem some analogy to the prose fiction, Giovanna Prima, mentioned in a former number. Like that, it is a fragment of history developed imaginatively, and, in the present case, poetically also. The poem is little more than a relation of the commencement of the Emperor Henry of Luxemburg's expedition into Italy, in the years 1310-11, to receive the imperial and iron crown; upon See Foreign Quarterly Review, No. xxxiv., p. 473. VOL. XXI. NO. XLI. D which occasion he paused in Lombardy to pacify that (in those days) ever turbulent portion of the peninsula. The subject is well chosen. From amongst the Lombard broils the poet has selected for his theme those which distracted their chief city Milan, with the rivalry of the Torriani and Visconti; and which rivalry Henry appeased, or rather quelled, by expelling Guido della Torre, and reinstating the exiled Matteo Visconte. Upon this historical event Carcano has superinduced a Romeo and Juliet story-the loves of Alfredo Visconte and Ida della Torre -but unluckily he has not managed it with the genius of Shakspeare. His Romeo, Alfredo, who has no father to control his proceedings, unceremoniously, unscrupulously, and without other motive than his passion, deserts his kindred and party to join his mistress's parent. The only plea we can allege in his favour is, that his desertion of the Visconti takes place at the moment when their sun is rising, and that he follows the Torriani when they in their turn tread the paths of exile. But the lady's father, who is clearly no obstinate Capulet, gives his daughter so readily to Alfredo on his, the lover's, death-bed, that we cannot imagine why they were not married when both were alive and well. Of this pregnant subject the author has made nothing in the way of story. He evidently possesses a strong and fervid imagination, capable of producing something very superior to Ida della Torre, however ephemerally popular this tale may be in Italy. The defects of the poem originate chiefly in the writer's having trusted merely to inspiration, without duly and previously meditating upon, planning, and working out his subject. To exhibit his poetic powers we translate the opening stanzas. "Look, Italy, upon thy native sky Gloriously radiant with the noontide blaze; The water of two seas around thee plays: Art thou, or new-formed man's first dream of love! Thy blest enchantment, trees and flowers among; |