The Press.
London, England, 1858-03-06 00:00:00

THE PRE S S, MARCH 6, 1858.

and uniform, and religion; ho liked books, a
French tailor, and suburban gallantries. But
he had to pay dear for his tastes. After being
" hit about the head on and off for some years,"
as Captain Cutler might have said, with his
father's walking-stick, he was finally immured
in the fortress of Custrin, condemned to see
one of his comrades suffer death, and a young
lady to whom he was attached publicly whipped
through the streets.
The King's notion of making himself agree-
able was scarcely less unpleasant. On the
marriage of his daughter to the Prince of
Baircuth, we are told—" The King succeeded
" very tolerably in his effort to intoxicate the
" bridegroom, and performed the further pa-
" ternal duty of making the bride, when un-
dressed, kneel down on the floor to repeat
the Creed and the Lord's Prayer aloud." He,
however, had a great horror of display, of
which the Queen, who was a handsome wo-
man, was rather fond :

Sophia Dorothea had a set of very splendid diamonds,
which she seldom ventured to wear in the presence of her
arbitrary arid displayabhorring lord. She herself, however,
had no objection to array her fine person in costly attire,
and upon one occasion, during the King's temporary in-
disposition, she appeared at a birthday ball at Monbijou
adorned with these magnificent ornaments. The evening
was very gay in the absence of the stern master; the
dancing and music were at their height, and the Queen
was deeply imersed in her game, when the announcement,
" The King is coming," caused a general consternation.
The music ceased, the dancing stopped; and the Queen,
as she sat, hastily unclasped her jewels and thrust them
into her pocket, before the King had time to withdraw his
angry gaze from the brilliantly and extravagantly lighted
apartment, and perceive them.

His passion for " propagating procerity" is
well known; and he was always on the look
out for individuals adapted to his purpose.
The following absurd mistake will remind
some of our readers of a similar anecdote re-
lated of a deceased nobleman of peculiar cele-
brity :

His passion for tall soldiers led him to wish to raise a
race of large people, so as to be able to recruit his great
regiment without trouble. One day meeting a very tall
and well•made village girl in the neighbourhood of Puts-
dam, he asked her to take a note, which he wrote on the
spot, to the captain of his regiment. Either suspecting
something, or being in a hurry, the girl gave the note to a
little old woman whom she fell in with, and charged her to
deliver it as directed. This note contained an order to
the captain to have the bearer instantly married to the
tallest man in the regiment, whose name was specified.
On being acquainted with his fate, and introduced to his
bride, the poor young fellow was in despair. He begged
and entreated, fell on his knees and wept, but all to no
purpose; the King's will was law, and the matrimonial
noose was tied. However, the King, on hearing of the ex-
change of brides that had been made, allowed the marriage
to be dissolved.

The Queen of Frederick the Great was
forced on him against his will, and, according
to Johnson, the marriage was never consum-
mated. The King, however, always treated
her with great respect, and required that
others should do so too. Hers indeed was a
melancholy position ; for she was passionately
attached to the husband under whose roof she
led the life of a widow, and, with a clqtracter
eminently suited to the discharge of domestic
duties, was cut off from all the pleasures of
maternity. She survived her husband eleven
years, dying in 1796, at the age of eighty-one,
and to the last was respected and beloved by
the Prussian people and all the younger mem-
bers of her own family, in whose joy and sor-
rows she was always a sympathising parti-
cipator.

Those who like gossip about the great will
find our authoress very entertaining. We
have given our readers a sample of her work,
and we leave them to form their own opinion.

British India, its Races and its History, Con-
sidered with Reference to the Mutinies of 1857.
By John Malcolm Ludlow. Two Vols.
Cambridge: Macmillan.
India in 1858. A Summary of the Existing
Administration, Political, Fiscal, and
Judicial, of British Tndia. By Arthur Mills,
M.P. With a Revenue Map. London :
Murray.
TUE twenty-one lectures of which Mr. Lud-
low's volumes consist are an expansion of a
course delivered by hint last year to the

233

students of the Working-men's College. They
make no pretensions to Oriental learning, but
are compiled from such authorities as the
works of Elphinstone, Mill, Wilson, Hough,
Macaulay, Kaye, Rickards, and Mrs. Speir ; and
profess "to teach nothing to those who know
" India, but only a little to those who do not."
The work falls into three divisions ; the first
five lectures treating of the soil and the races
of India, the eleven succeeding ones of the
history of our dominion, and the remainder, of
the present crisis, its lessons and its re-
'lndies. The author, as might be conjectured
from his names, is Anglo-Indian by connection,
and has had numerous opportunities of form-
ing an opinion on Indian matters before com-
►nencing his studies for the present work.
His reading appears to have been wide, his
style is terse and effective, and the whole
work, though onesided in its bias, is evidently
written by one who has done his best to keep
his judgment cool and impartial under cir-
cumstances which make either quality very
difficult of attainment. It reads, perhaps, less
freshly than Miss Martineau's brilliant sketch,
but contains more information, being more
closely packed, as well as of far greater length.
Its arrangement is more methodical, and its
general aspect is that of greater carefulness
and elaboration.

Of the first five lectures we are able to
speak very highly ; not that their materials
are altogether new, but that they are presented
in a more compendious and readable form
than is usually met with. The following
analogy between Asia. and Europe has not,
we think, been previously pointed out :
The best idea I can give you of India's place in the
world, i 3 by saying that India is the Italy of Asia,—the
jewel of that continent, as Italy is of this; an Italy, on a
large scale of course, answering to that of the Asiatic con-
tinent itself, as compared with Europe. The stupendous
wall of the Himalayas shuts it out from the cold of the
north, in the same way as the comparatively low boundary
fence of the Alps defends our European Italy. The Indus,
indeed, flowing from the Himalayas southward and forming
the western boundary of India, may seem to vary the analogy.
Bat if the Rhone, instead of falling to the west of the Alps,
found its way from the Lake of Geneva southward through
one of the valleys of Savoy, that analogy would be once
more complete, and the mountain chains of Afghanistan
wnuld, be seen to correspond exactly to the western Alps.
Only by recognising this analogy can we understand how
Herat should be reckoned the key of India. Again, the
Ganges, with its many feeders, pouring down from the
Himalayas into an eastward sea, forms within it, as its
miniature, the Po, does in Northern Italy, a basin of un-
rivalled extent and fertility, and marked out at its lower
end as one of the special seats of a cultivation which is
also in Europe characteristic of the basin of the Po--that,
namely, of rice, the main food of the inhabitants of Bengal ;
the Burrampooter accompanying it to the north, much as
the Adige does the Po. The sudden narrowing of the
Italian peninsula, the long chain of the Apennines which
divides it, may appear to you to hinder further resemblance.
It is not so in reality. The whole central portion of the
Indian peninsula may be said to be one Apennine. These
two mountain ridges, which in our maps seem to rise
from en even plain on both aides, are in fact only the
supports of that tableland of the Deckan of which I
spoke-1,500 feet above the aea level—and form with it
consequently, as compared with the lowlands of the coast,
only one immense bill. To the south, lastly, the magni-
ficent island of Ceylon, detached from the mainland before
history began, stands in the same relation to India as
Sicily to Italy.
If we pass from physical to historical resemblance, we
shall be surprised to find how close the parallel holds.'
As in Europe, Italy has always been the land of promise
of the northern barbarian, so has India been in Asia.
Although its northern barmier is well-nigh impassable to
armies, it is accessible from the north-east, from the
northwest, and from the west; and as the German and
tho enchnian have contended with each other in-
cessantly for the one, so have the Afghan, the Tartar, the
Persian for the other.

Four " strata " of inhabitants are described
as forming the population. First come the
aboriginal tribes, to whose ancestors are pro-
bably to be ascribed the Cyclopean remains and
ancient roads found in remote parts of the pen-
insula. They practise xicarions human sacri-
fices, and their worship i 8 like a horrible parody
of Christianity. Their origin was probably
Scythian, and the black blood of Hindostan is
derived from their intermixture. They have
never given up the idea that they are the real
owners of the soil. Next come the Hindoos,
whose fair complexion, once white as that of
Europeans, betrays their northern origin.
Their religion, unlike that of the Greeks,
Romans, and Indian aborigines, which was
Landed down by ceremonies, has the vitality
derivable from its preservation by %written
records. Their chief characteristics are their
organised polytheism, their division into