The Press. — London, England, 1853-07-09 00:00:00

232 The education question alone remains ; and here neither our author nor any one else can succeed in making out a case for the Com pany. The statistics of this subject are few end simple. Up to 1823 nothing was done by Government—very little by private agency. In 1928 the Hindu College was established and endowed, Oriental study alone being pur sued there. In 1935, after much controversy, the Oriental teaching was overthrown by Lord William l3entinek, and English science and literature substituted, Macaulay being among the strenuous supporters of the change. A wise regulation was at the same time framed by which the stipends formerly allowed to students during the time of their tuition were discontinued. Lord Hardinge, in the famous minute of 1844, announced that a preference should be given in conferring official appoint ments to natives who had passed examina tion at the college, or at other similar institu tions—a benevolent rule, but scarcely a wise one, since its effect has been to make every young student believe that he had a right, not as matter of favour, but of justice, to be main tained in official employ at the expense of his countrymen. Something, but not much, has been done for vernacular education. The total expenditure •of the Company on this score is about 80,0001. yearly—a sum which Dr. Marshmau himself declares to be shame- Ailly inadequate. The quality of the teaching given at the various colleges is good, but the precocious youth seldom ripens into an able, active, working man : I do sot believe that them are Wit a down boys at Eton or aterrew who weld *Ruin is obscure passage in Milton or nealmileare. ci griever a aeries of historical questions, extruding frets the days of Alexander to the days of Nevritit as much critical acuteness and accuracy of ansidoe as the white-mmilined students who, with se much ewe, master the difficult examination-papers whisk it hes taxed all the learning and all the ingenuity of hallitrogessisil itielleit gentlemen of ripe experience to =would in any such triad of skill put our young to confabion. AU this is past dispute—the proficiency is admitted. But there has seldom been much more than tho pro ficiency of the clever boy. A very few exceptional cases, bet sullicient to prove the rule on the other aide, might addlined to chow that European education has struck heap root in the native mind; but. the good seed commonly fell by the wayside, and the birds of the air devoured it. All the enervating and enfeebling envimnments of Indian life, at the critical period of adolescence, closed around the native youth, to stupefy and to deaden both the intel lectual faculties and the moral sense. The hookah and 'the amens did their sure work. And in a year or two 'there was little left of the bright-faced, quick-witted boy who could put the Penmen's° into good English prose, tell you who were Pepin and Charle s Martel, and explain the character of the " self-denying ordinance" as accurately as Hallam or Macaulay. Much is professedly done by missionaries ; but though they spend Igo,oool. yearly, and educate 120,000 children, the effects of their labour are inadequate to its amount. The fanatical zeal and want of intellectual disci pline common among this class have gone far to lessen the prestige of European wisdom among a people remarkably subtle and scepti cal, though Dr. Duff and some others deserve mention as honourable exceptions. Govern ment wisely stands neutral, refusing to take any part in proselytising enterprises, whereby it has drawn upon itself the same kind of honourable odium which Lord Derby incurred as founder of the Irish national schools. But thin negative merit is all to which the Com pany can lay claim. Next to public works, there is no department of Indian administra tion so neglected as the educational. Better things may be hoped for the future, especially if Sir C. Wood's bill does not pass. We have done with Mr. Kaye, and, though we differ from much of what he has written, and cannot but regard him as in some sort a partisan, we admire his talent, applaud his general fairness, and part from him in kind new Of all books written to supply the mo mentary demand for Indian information, he has written the best. His style is clear, and not without point, though we occasionally meet with a passage which strikes unplea santly upon our car as an echo of Macaulay. Ilia statistics, whenever we have been able to verify them, we have found accurate ; and this is a rarer merit than many people would readily believe. THE PRESS. Cranford. By the Author of " Mary Barton," " Ruth," &c. London : Chapman and Hall. A PEACEFUL country place—just large enough to be dignified with the title of town—secluded • in position, primitive iu manners, quaint as to its architecture, patriarchal in all its social habitudes, " old fashioned " in short, in every point of view and every sense of the word, — such is the " Cranford " which gives a name to Mrs. Gaskell's new romance and a local habitation to her characters. These latter are in their turn fit denizens and natural products of the selected locality. Simple-minded virgins who derive their code of etiquette and date their day of beauty and flirtation from the model era of George the Third's Queen Charlotte ; dowagers who have re tired to distant Crin&rd upon the experiences of high life and of busy cities which they have gathered in some provincial capital ; home spun spinsters who hold high social rank because their ancestor was rector, or a distant connection the baronet of provincial grandeur, —these, with a fair sprinkling of aspiring parvenus who struggle into the society of Cranford " exclusives," despite the suspicion of trade or the reality of a plebeian name, arc the homely personages with whom the authoress wishes, and compels, her readers to feel an interest. With such scenery and actors the drama is naturally a quiet one. There is no stirring incident and no hero throughout the volume. Cranford, as we are told at the outset, hardly possessed a =Well - line inhabitant, at all events of any worth knowing or mentioning. Two or three he chameters appear upon the scene ; but they are mere aecessanes necessary to the develop ment of the story, and act but the part of walking gentlemen in the feminine tragi comedy playing out around them. Judging from the role assigned to them in her book, we should be almost inclined to believe that the authoress, like her own excellent Miss enkyns, " despised the modern idea of women being equal to men. Equal indeed ! she knew they were superior." Upon the stage thus kept clear for the gentler sex a drama of deep though subdued interest is represented. We have met with few pictures of English life in the country at once so pleasing and so true as those delineated by Mrs. (iaskell. How ditferent from the spasmo dic existence and slightly-veiled depravity describedhy the French historian of the vie pro vinciale g How different also from the servants hall vulgarisms and cockney raralities which we find in the sketches of Trollope and Howitt ? The authoress of " Ruth " and " Cranworth " gives us something purer than the first, and something truer than the last. We are allowed to smile without bitterness at intrigues which involve nothing but priority in some fashion ten years post-dated from the Belk A ssemblie,and laugh without contempt at the troubles arising out of the awkwarduesses of a rustic servant girl, evidently a descendant from one of the ploughboy flunkies in Goldsmith's comedy : 1 undertook the management of the coffee, and told her I would instruct Martha in the art of waiting, in which it must he owned she was terribly deficient ; and that 1 had 310 doubt Mitior and Mrs. Jenkyns would understand the quiet mode in which a lady lived by herself in a country town. But she was sadly fluttered. I made her empty her decanters and bring np two fresh bottles of wine. wished I could have prevented her from being present at my instructions to Martha ; for she frequently out. in with some fresh direction, muddling the poor girl's mind, as she stood open-mouthed, listening to us both. " Hand the vegetables round," said I (foolishly, I see now—for it was aiming at more than we could accomplish with quietness and simplicity) : and then, seeing her look bewildered, I added, " Take the vegetables round to people, and let them help themselves." " And mind you go first to the ladies," put in Miss Matilda. " Always go to the ladies before gentlemen, when you are waiting." " do it as you tell me, ma'am," said Martha ; " but I like lads best." We felt very uncomfortable and shocked at this speech of klartlues : vet I don't think she meant any harm; and, on the whole, she attended very well to our directions, ex• cept that she " nudged " the major, when he did not help himself as soon as she expected to the potatoes, while she was handing them round. Even in the following pleasant quiz upon female inconsequence, though there may be a trifle of exaggeration, there is not an iota of ill nature. Information is sought respecting a certain Peter who disappeared years ago, SATURDAY, and is suspected to be somewhere in the East:— I remember asking Miss Pole (and I thought the flues don was very opportune, for I put it when 1 met her at a call at Mrs. korrester's, and Loth the ladies had known Peter, and I imagined that they might refresh each other's memories) ; I asked Miss Pule what was the very last thing they had ever heard about him ; and then she named the absurd report to which I have alluded, about his having been elected great Lama of Thibet ; and this was a signal for each lady to go off on her separate idea. Mrs. Forrester's start was made on the Veiled Prophet in "Lana Rookh"----whether 1 thought he was meant for the. Great Lama, though► Peter was not so ugly, indeed rather hand some if he had not been freckled. I was thankful to see her double upon Peter; but, in a moment, the delu sive lady was off upon Rowland's kalydor, and the merits of cosmetics and hair oils in general, and holding forth so fluently that 1 turned to listen to Miss; Pole, who (through the Haltom, the beasts of burden) had got to Peruvian bonds, and the Share Market, and her poor °pluton of joint-stock banks in general, and of that one in parti cu l ar in which Miss Mattes money was invested. In vain I put in, " When was it—m what year was it, that you heard that Mr. Peter was the Great Lama? " They only joined issue to dispute whether llama were carnivorous animate or not; in which dispute they were not quite un • fair grounds, as Mrs. Forrester (after they hail grown warm and cool again 1 acknowledged that she always confused carnivorous and graminivorous together, just as she did horizontal and perpendicular; but then she apologised for it very prettily, by saying that in her day the only use people made of four-syllabled words was to teach how they should be spelt. The only fact I gained from this conversation was that certainly Peter had been last heard of in India, "or that neighbourhood ;" and that this scanty intelligence of his whereabouts had reached Cranford in the year when Miss Pule had bought her India muslin gown, long since wont out (we washed it and mended it, and traced its decline and fall into a window-blind, before we could go on) ; and in a year when Wombwell came to Cranford, because Miss Matty had wanted to see an elephant in order that she might the better imagine Peter ruling on one ; and had 1 1 seen a boa-constrictor too, which was more than she wished . . to imagine in her fancy pictures of Peter's locality;—and in a year when Miss Jenkyns had learnt some piece of poetry off by heart, and used to say, at all the Cranford parties, how Peter was " surveying mankind from China to Peru," which everybody had thought very grand, anti rather appropriate, because India was between China and Peru, if you took care to turn the globe to the left instead of the right. We have left untouched the story of this hook, with which a large circle of readers are already acquainted, from its appearance in Household Words ; but, believing that England has many nooks like Cranford, we acknow ledge the talent of the artist who has depicted them with so many touches of quiet and feminine pathos. The Narrative of an Explorer in Tropical South Africa. By Francis Oalton, Esq. London : Murray. Tars is a real book of travels after the old models, and Mr. Galton is a real traveller— not one of the pretentious class of tourists who rush into print on the strength of a few nights' bivouac in the desert, a lion-hunt. and, perhaps, a skirmish with Indians or banditti. Since the premature death of Ruxton, the most indefatigable of explorers and the most fascinating of storytellers, we have seen no thing better of its kind than this little volume. In some respects, indeed, Mr. Galton has the best of the parallel ; for Ruxton, with all his energy, never achieved anything in the way of discovery. His African attempt was a failure; whereas our author, starting from nearly the same point, actually penetrated three hundred miles into an unexplored tract, visited a tribe which no European knew except by report, and reached a higher parallel of latitude than any traveller on the south-western coast of Africa had yet attained. He tells his story, too, in a plain, off hand way which marks him as the very opposite of a bookmaker ; neither swaggering about his perils nor affecting to despise them, but taking them as matters of course, necessary to be undergone in such a journey, and forming part. of its inevitable accompaniments. Why he went, or with what object, except to gratify a love of wandering, we are not told, nor do we greatly care to know. A man well-to-do in the world is not called to account by his neighbours for leading a life of respectable inactivity; and, while one costly expedition is sent out after another in search of the North Vele or the North-west Passage, a private individual de serves no censure because. unpaid and unem ployed, he chooses to risk his life in promoting geographical science.