The Press.
London, England, 1858-03-27 00:00:00

THE PRESS, MARCH 27, 1858.

If it be true that the present Lord Rector of Marischal
College has announced a prize for the best essay on " Ali-
son's History of Europe, we may possibly be reserving
ourselves fur that struggle. Meanwhile, and in return for
Mr. Alison's liberal concession, we can only promise that,
whenever our majority takes place, the learned Sheriff of
Lanarkshire shall have received due notice, and an invita-
tion to the festivities with which the public will expect that
an event so remarkable should be celebrated. Everything
will be on a scale of the greatest magnificence, and an au-
thor will be roasted whole on the occasion.

Lord Ellesmere was an uncompromising
" Laker." No syllable of detraction from the
' Wellington genius is permitted to escape cas-
tigation. He loses no opportunity of contrast-
ing him with other great soldiers and has
drawn a curious comparison between the
battles of Lutzen and Salamanca, which would
scarcely have occurred to any but the vigilant
eye of affection. Lord Ellesmere's military
reviews, of which there are five, seem all very
good, and we do not think the present the least
opportune moment that could have been
chosen for the publication of them.
From the two essays upon Art we extract
the following opinion of the painter Haydon :
We have mentioned the gratification we have expe-
rienced from the perusal of Mr. Hazlitt's essay; we must
add a similar testimony in favour of his fellow•labourer,
Mt. Haydon. His treatise seems to ns the result of study
and observation extensive and profound. Some evidence of
these qualities was necessary to give weight and authority
to the freedom and decision of his style of criticism. We
recommend to our readers a very ingenious theory on a
passage of Pliny which has puzzled all commentators—the
anecdote of the visit of Apelles to the studio of Protogenea
(p. 107); and which seems to no to offer as rational a
solution of the difficulty as, at this distance of time, can be
supplied. His opinions on the subject of our own, and all
other possible academies, are well known ; and his indigna•
tion against them in this treatise occupies fewer of its pages
than we should have expected. We cannot controvert the
fact that few men of eminence have been formed by
academies ; nor can we, at the same time, understand why
or how sterling genius and talent should suffer itself to be
depressed by any circumstances incident to the existence
of an academy. Having under review this volume of Mr.
Haydon, we should apologise for not having sooner noticed
as an artist the painter of the Judgment of Solomon, of
which, were we to say that it is superior to any contempo-
rary English picture on a sacred subject, he would hardly
take the assertion as a ccinpliment. Few painters have
been more unequal, and few we fear less for'unate ; but
his talents have been recognised by the most illustrious of
his contemporaries in other departments—and the en-
thusiastic eulogies of Wordsworth in particular will have
dae weight hereafter.

Of the remaining essays, five are devoted to
travels and two to engineering subjects. In
narrative or description, however, Lord Elles-
mere is less attractive than in commentary.
But the papers are all characterised by sound
sense, a tone of high cultivation, and easy, um
affected language. We must notice, in con-
elusicn, tho failure of one political prophecy—
of the date of 1853:

For the convenience of political arrangements, and for
the sake of general peace, Finland has und. tone a pro-
cess of absorption in which we apprehend her own wishes
and feelings have been little consulted. Should that peace
he disturbed, and the foundations of the present system
of European polity be shaken by a wanton hand, some
countries, and Finland among then), may yet present
examples of the instattility of a compulsory allegiance, and
events may awake reminiscences which do but slumber
under Russian rule. It was not for the diffusion of the
doctrines of the orthodox Grqek Church, or the establish-
ment of despotism in Europe, that the blue and yellow
Finland regiments of Gustavus lay dead in their racks at
Latzen.

We believe there is no reason for supposing
that the Fins ever wavered in their allegiance
during the late war. But the concluding sen-
tence of the extract is good rhetoric, and a
worthy tribute to the soldiers whose deseen•
dants are still some of the bravest and hardiest
servants of their Russian master.

A Journey through the Kingdom of Oude in
1849-1850. With Private Correspondence
relative to the Annexation of Oude to
British India. By Nlajor-General Sir W.
H. Sleeman, K.C.8., Resident at the Court

of Lucknow. Two Vols. London : Bentley.
OF all the books which have been called forth
by the late events in India, this is probably
the most important. Information as valuable
and interesting on the subjects of which it
treats may possibly be lying hid in unopened
blue-books or among the MS. archives of
Lcadcnhall-street ; but nothing has hitherto
been published which throws so much light
on the causes and nature of the struggle now
proceeding iu the East as the account which

these volumes contain of the home and the
character of tie enemies by whom it is chiefly
sustained. Colonel Sleeman, who held the
post of Resident at Lucknow from 1849 to
1856, who had spent the previous forty years
of his life in India, and whose " Rambles and
Recollections of an Indian Official" had already
proved him to be a careful and unprejudiced
observer, has in the diary before us recorded
the impressions derived from a three months'
tour, undertaken for the express purpose of
familiarizing himself with the capabilities and
inhabitants of the country in whose govern-
ment he would naturally be destined to inter-
fere. It is much to be regretted that the able
author of this book did not live long enough
to come before the public with all the aids to a
due comprehension of his work which he himself
would have been best able to bestow. Though
nothing can impair its sterling value and in-
terest, the convenience of a reader has been
very inadequately consulted by these who
have prepared it for the press. There is no
index—a thing indispensable in every hook
where the information on various points is so
scattered as it is in a diary • nor is the table
of contents very carefully drawn up. To the
correspondence prefixed and subjoined there
are no notes or connecting narrative; and many
of the letters written before the author was
appointed at Lucknow, should either have
been omitted or else fully elucidated. Several
others in vol. ii., which relate to disputes be-
tween the Resident and his subordinates,
would, we suspect, have been suppressed by
the author, their reproduction being calculated
to annoy living persons after the occasion had
wholly past away. The titlepage and part of
the introduction are somewhat misleading.
We are given to understand that the tour was
undertaken by command of Lord Dalhousie,
and many persons have naturally believed that
his object was to use Colonel Sleeman as an
agent for the collection of evidence to justify
his predetermined annexation of the country.
At. p. xvii. we read :
Accordingly on the 18th September, 1848, the Governor-
General addressed the following letter to Sir William Slee-
man, cointni,sioning him to wake a personal visit to all
parts of the kingdom.
But the letter itself is simply the offer of the
appointment of Resident. There is not a word
in it about " visiting all parts of the country."
The fact is, that, as we learn from the very
first page of the diary, the tour was first sug-
gested by Colonel Sleemen himself, and re-
ceived the sanction of Government in the early
part of 1849. At p. lxxviii., a letter commences,
•• Here is a little item of palace news," but we
are not told what it is. The map in vol. i. is
stated to be " drawn under the superin-
tendence of" tho author; but if this is the
case, it is curious that the spelling of the
names of places in it should so continually
vary from that which we find in the text. In-
deed they differ so much that the route is
sometimes difficult to follow. The biographi-
cal sketch is as meagre as it could well he, and
the author of it apoears to be unaware that
Colonel Sleeman had published the very inte-
resting work to which we have above alluded
It may, also, be a clerical error, but no one
conversant with India would speak of a thing
being done " by Sir W. Sleeman while a Resi-
" dent at the Court of Lucknow" (p. xviii.), any
more than we should talk of the Reformation
having taken place " while Henry VIII. was a
" King of England."
Oude is a territory containing upwards of
23.000 square miles, and is not much inferior
in extent to Ireland. Watered by two noble
rivets, the Ganges and the Gogra, as well as
by the Goomtee and its tributary streams, it
enjoys a healthy and comparatively temperate
climate, a soil as fertile as any in India, and
produces every kind of grain and the finest
forest trees. At rabitlft tiq res absent et veva
leonum semina—there are really fewer wild beasts
than in other parts of the peninsula. Un-
fortunately, the most dangerous tigers there
are those that walk on two legs. The state of
society when the Resident made his tour was
like that of Europe in the most lawless epochs
of the middle ages. The whole prosperity of
the country depended on the strength and
wisdom of the King ; and all kings since 1814
had been both weak and foolish. Extravagant
and superstitious even beyond the wont of

Eastern despots, and emasculated by every
species of sensual indulgence, they secluded
themselves in the recesses of their zenanas,
and left the country to the malversations of
their favourites and the anarchy produced by
a rapacious landed aristocracy. All the abuses
which such a state of society can engender
seemed to have come to a head in the person
of \Vajid Alec Khan, the last king. The
monarch himself took no heed whatever of
public business, but passed his whole time in
the society of singers, eunuchs, and poetasters,
with the latter of whom he frequently conde-
scended to compete. No public works were
carried on ; the pay of the troops was in
arrear, and was discharged by assigning to
theta the revenues of a district. The Court
parasites absorbed the money, and the soldiers
helped themselves by plundering the villages.
Nor was this the only oppression to which the
cultivator was exposed. The revenue collec-
tors from the city, who were thorough cockneys
and ignorant of all agricultural matters,
farmed the revenue sometimes on the "con-
tract system," by which they bound themselves
to pay a definite sum to the Government,
sometimes on the " trust system," which
obliged them to pay all they could get ; but in
enter ease squeezed the ryot out of the last
coin they could exact. More powerful even
than tne collectors were the independent hind-
holders or great barons, with whom might
always made right, and who, having gained
possession by force or fraud of half a-dozen
villages, laid waste a portion and turned it
into jungle, in order to serve as cover for the
mud forts in which they defied both their
rivals and the sovereign power. More than
eight hundred square miles in the kingdom of
Oude were devoted to these jungles, which
afforded sport to the chieftain, grazing ground
for his cattle, and means of escape in case of
attack. No stories of medireval cruelty and
rapine, nor even the atrocities which have
been practised in India on our own country-
men, can equal the scenes which were of
monthly occurrence in Oude, and with which
two-thirds of Colonel Sleeman's volumes are
filled. We began a classification of the mur-
ders and robberies he mentions, but found
that the analysis Would extend beyond all
reasonable limits. Female infanticide was a
practice almost universal, and the proud
Rajpoot who would have disdained to be any
man's " brother-in-law " on the sister's side,
bought a wife of higher caste at an enormous
price, or pretended to believe that the one
stolen and brought over the frontier to him,
Was at least of rank equal to his own. Yet
the system of these ruffians was not without
its benefits—at any rate as compared with the
no-government of the King. They were at
least strong, and, their authority once estab-
lished, their feudal dependants enjoyed that
sort of security which results from only one
person having a right to plunder. The law of
primogeniture was in force among them, and
there was something settled in their rule.
which generally induced the villagers, who
had been driven away in their struggle to
attain it, to return and recommence cultiva-
tion. The great want was that of a middle
class, the materials for which existed in the
shape of a great number of persons who en •
joyed guaranteed incomes from the British
Government, but who would have been
crushed had they attempted to become coun-
try gentlemen, and who therefore remained at
Lucknow, an overgrown and useless aristo-
cracy.

It might naturally be supposed that the
lower classes would welcome any change, even
that of annexation, under such oppression.
But this, Colonel Sleeman says, was not the
case. They admitted the insecurity of pro-
perty ; but they seemed to have something
of a Celtic taste for fighting, and a no less
Celtic distaste for law. They appreciated the
good intentions of the British Government,
whose officers never interfered but for their
good ; but they saw that. the landholders
iwindled away in the half of the country which
nad been ceded to us, and they distrusted the
delays and complications of the English
courts, where witnesses were only estimated
by their number, and where there was no
public opinion to cheek false swearing, no
rustic ordeal to confound the criminal in the