Like the writer of this notice, we were intimately acquainted with Saunders Machomash, and can corroborate in every point, the truth of his estimate. Saunders, a noble specimen of the poor fisherman elevated by Christianity, was a man of pleasing and venerable aspect-tall, and for his years erect and active-neat, and even picturesque in his homely fisher dress and high-crowned hat -with features alike expressive of intelligence and benevolenceand cherishing a profusion of dark hair, slightly touched by grey, that descended in curls on his shoulders. Some fashions have a curious genealogy. The class emphatically termed the "men of Ross-shire,"-perhaps the truest representatives which Scotland possesses in the present age of her old Covenanters, have worn during at least the last hundred years, long flowing hair arranged on the shoulders, in a style that much more closely resembles the love-tresses of the Cavaliers than the close-cropped locks of the Roundheads. We have seldom seen a true specimen of this venerable class-now fast wearing out-without marvelling how the fashion should have come so thoroughly to change sides, that the flowing curls of Claverhouse and Montrose should be found imparting an antique peculiarity of aspect to men who would have been the first to take their stand against them on the hill-side. Saunders was a skilful fisherman, and in general matters-trained to think by his religion-a very intelligent man; but his superiority over his fellows consisted mainly in the beauty of his life as a probationary course for eternity, spent in faith in the eye of the great Taskmaster, Humble as was his place in society, his light was not hidden, but shone conspicuous from its little sphere. In the August of 1832, the Cholera was introduced from Wick into the fishing villages of Easter Ross, and raged among them with frightful intensity. In the fishing village of Portmahomack, one-fifth of the inhabitants were swept away; in the fishing village of Inver, one-half. The infection spread with frightful rapidity; the people of the neighbouring districts were struck with overpowering alarm. At Inver, though the population did not much exceed a hundred persons, eleven bodies were committed to the earth without shroud or coffin, in one day, and in two days after they had buried nineteen more. Many of the survivors fled from the village, and took shelter, some in the woods which abound in the district, some among the hollows of an extensive track of sand hills; but the pest followed them to their hiding-places, and they expired in the open air. Whole families were found lying dead on their cottage floors;-in one sad case, an infant, the only survivor, lay grovelling on the lifeless body of its motherthe sole mourner in a charnel-house of the pestilence. The infection reached Hill-town, the village in which Saunders

Machomash resided; and the inhabitants of the surrounding country placed it in a state of strict quarantine. Most of the fishermen of the village were miserably poor; the disease had broken out early in the season of the herring-fishery, at a time when the greater part of their means had been expended in preparation, and they had received scarce any return; there were cases in which, so abject was their poverty, that there was not a candle in a whole group of cottages; and when the disease seized on the inmates in the night time, they had to grapple in darkness with its fierce pains and mortal terrors, and their friends, in the vain attempt to assist them, had to grope round their beds. The intense dread experienced in the surrounding districts, was perhaps not quite unaccompanied by the too common mixture of selfish hard-heartedness which mingles in such extreme cases, with the instinct of self-preservation; and in the infected villages, shut up as in a state of siege, there prevailed a scarce less natural, though not less lamentable feeling of fierce exasperation, blended with a savage desire of seeing their calamity extended to their neighbours. Human nature, exposed to circumstances so trying, proves often a fearful thing. It has been even said, that infected rags were carried by the fisher people into the fields with the apparent intention of spreading the contagion; and it is all too certain, there were cases in which the members of fisher families, attacked by the disease, were deserted by their relatives, and left to perish alone. But the extreme severity of the trial served but to exhibit all the more strongly the sterling worth of Saunders Machomash. Shut up with the others-with no other prospect than that of being consigned, mayhap ere the lapse of a single day, to a hastily scooped grave in some sandy hillock-his whole time was spent in going from one infected dwelling to another, doing all he could for the bodies of the sufferers, and all he could for their souls. Even when, inside some hapless cottage, the stench of disease and death rose so rank that he could no longer enter the door, Saunders might be seen seated outside some low window, with his Bible in his hand, urging on the dying, so long as they could frame a wish or breathe prayer, the one only salvation. To this high pitch of heroism did Christianity elevate a poor fisherman. But it was not then that its power on the class to which he belonged was first exhibited. It breathed its invigorating influences on a few fishermen of old, originally, we doubt not, as simple and uninformed as Saunders, and leaving their nets beside the sea of Galilee, they went forth in the power of the Gospel to Christianize the world.

VOL. I. NO. II.

2 B

ART. III.-The Vishnu Purána; a System of Hindu Mythology and Tradition. Translated from the original Sanskrit, and illustrated by Notes, derived chiefly from other Puránas. By H. H. WILSON, M.A., F.R.S., &c.; Boden Professor of Sanskrit in the University of Oxford. 4to. London. 1840.

THE aboriginal inhabitants of India, properly so called, and who are now represented by the rude and barbarous tribes occupying the most inaccessible mountain ranges, and inexhaustible jungles of that great country, have no literature, either sacred or profane, written or oral. Their religion is that of a simple system of superstition, resting as much on the natural and suggestive fears and desires of the human mind, as on traditions which are handed down from sire to son, alike without the embellishments of song, or the precision of the established chronicle or exciting romance. Their imagination fills their gloomy forests with malevolent spirits, human, superhuman, and infrahuman, and particularly the ghosts of their own ancestors, and of the diverse beasts of prey which were their quondam companions. Their worship is principally a deprecation of evil, conducted by bloody sacrifices and peace-offerings to the beings, seen and unseen, from whom they apprehend injury. When they rise above this devotion, it is principally to take cognizance of the multifarious powers which they suppose direct and control the various objects of nature, and occurrences of providence, and occupations of savage life, with which they are most familiar. They have not even, in general, a regular and established priesthood. Their principal religious ceremonies and services are conducted by the aged or honoured persons of their community, both male and female. In this situation, in India, there are, perhaps, eight or nine millions of our race, the descendants of the most ancient inhabitants of the country, who have never yet submitted their necks to the oppressive yoke of the Brahmans, and who, in their remote and frequently noxious retreats, defy the zeal for proselytism, and spiritual prostitution and degrada tion, of that great priesthood. The aborigines have been classed under the general name of Kulis, or clansmen. Comparatively speaking, they form but a small portion of the population of India, which, including that of the countries on the banks of the Indus the river from which it receives its name has lately been estimated, by our best statists, at two hundred millions of souls. The Brahmans have the satisfaction of reflecting, that after many reverses, and serious conflicts with the Bauddhas,

Jainas, and other heretics, as well as with the aborigines, their faith is now dominant throughout the Indian Continent.

It is now universally allowed, however, by orientalists, that India, in which the Bráhmanical faith is now developed, is not the fatherland of that faith-or rather of that priesthood or lordly tribe, by which it has been so long upheld and propagated. The predecessors of the Bráhmans, it is admitted by all who have attentively considered their records and traditions, were first associated together in a country exterior to the Indus and the Himalaya range. Sir William Jones, our countryman, who was the first to dig a shaft into the mine of Sanskrit literature, brings them from Irán, or central Asia-which, not without reason, he holds to be the true centre of population, of knowledge, of languages, and of arts. Adelung brings them from a similar locality; Klaproth, from the Caucasian mountains; Schlegel, from the borders of the Caspian sea; and Vans Kennedy, from the plains of the Euphrates. The theories of these distinguished scholars are all plausibly supported; and they agree in this respect, that they all ascribe a trans-Indian origin to the Brahmans. The sacred language of the Brahmans, the Sanskrit, is cognate with the Zand, the language of ancient Media, and with the Palhaví, that of ancient Persia bordering on Mesopotamia; and both these languages, and particularly the former, bear to it many regular grammatical analogies, as well as a perfect, or nearly perfect, agreement in numerous vocables.* In the modern Persian even, there occur about three hundred words which are almost pure Sanskrit.† The religion of the Vedas, to which we shall immediately advert, bears a striking resemblance to that of the Yaçna, Vispard, and other liturgical works of the Zand-A vastá, the directory of the Zoroastrians of Persia. The Hindús fix their paradise in the north, which they tenant both by the gods and their deceased ancestors. The Manusarovar, or Lake of Intelligence, is with the Hindús a trans-Himalayan place of pilgrimage; and the designation of the Brahmaputra — the "Son of Brahma"-which rises beyond the Himalayan range, is similar to that by which the Bráhmans themselves are commonly known. Colonel Sykes, in his interesting "Notes on the Religious, Moral, and Political State of Ancient India," has shewn that there is good ground for believing that the Brahmans were first known in India as a small tribe of strangers, who located themselves in a little tract on the eastern confines of the Panjab. They continued, there can be no doubt, for a consi

See The Pársí Religion, as contained in the "Zand-Avastá," &c., by Dr. Wilson of Bombay.

+ Kennedy's "Affinity of Languages."

derable time to inhabit only the northern territories of India. The Punyabhumi, or Holy Land, of Manu, which is of no great extent, lies between the Drishadvatí and Sarasvati, which, as Professor Wilson has indicated, are "the Caggar and Sursooty of our barbarous maps." On the banks of the Sarasvati, according to some authorities, lived Vyása, the reputed compiler of the Vedas and Puránas. In the north of India are to be found the Devasthanas, or shrines; the Sangamas, or junctions of rivers; and the Sarovaras, or lakes, esteemed most sacred by the Hindús in all ages. In the same division of the country, the Solar and Lunar races of kings, the most distinguished in the records and romance of India, ruled and reigned. The Sanskrit language, which the Bráhmans probably formed, by artificial rule, from a ruder dialect, and which they carried along with themselves in their conquests, is more closely associated with the northern than the southern family of Indian languages. The different tribes of Bráhmans claim rank according to their supposed connexion with the north. Of the actual spread of Bráhmanism to the south, some indistinct notices are given in the Rámáyana, a heroic poem, next in point of antiquity to the Vedas, the most ancient sacred writings of the Hindús, in the Mahábhárata, and some of the Puránas. Ráma, the hero of the Rámáyana, who is represented as an incarnation of Vishnu, was undoubtedly a historical personage; and the accounts which are given of his progress to Lanká or Ceylon, clearly prove that he was opposed by various nations, who professed a faith different from that to which he lent his powerful aid to support and establish. As he proceeded on his career of victory, he formed many alliances with the tribes which he subdued, and who cooperated with his endeavours to overcome the Rakshasas, or devils, or, in other words, barbarians, who were the objects of his hate and persecution. Several of the castes recognized in India at the present day; as the Bhátelá, or agricultural Brahmans, whom we have met in the Ativísí - the country intermediate between the Táptí and the Daman-gangá ; ascribe some of their peculiar privileges to his munificence, as that of their permission to read the Vedas, and perform sacrifices in their own behalf, though not in the behalf of others. Ráma encountered great difficulties in the forests, especially in that of Dandak, bordering on the Narmadá; and it is in these very forests, and others of a similar character, and amidst the mountains of India, that, as we have already hinted, the tribes who have most successfully opposed Bráhmanism are principally to be found. The commonly-received legend of the creation of the Konkan-the region intermediate between the Western Ocean and the Sahyadri range of Gháts, and the subjection of a great