attempt to reconcile it with the pursuit of future happiness. The reader is aware that the regular Hindoo theologians attribute all the vices to the passions, and consider their subjugation, or annihilation, as essential to final beautitude; they therefore aim at the accomplishment of this object by means of severe bodily austerities. The vamacharees profess to seek the same object, not by avoiding temptation, and starving the body, but by blunting the edge of the passions with excessive indulgence. They profess to triumph over the regular Hindoos, reminding them that their ascetics are safe only in forests, and while keeping a perpetual fast; but that they subdue their passions in the very presence of temptation.

Thus, that which to the Hindoo should be divine worship, is the great source of impiety and corruption of manners: and, instead of returning from his temple, or from religious services, improved in knowledge, grieved for his moral deficiencies, and anxious to cultivate a greater regard to the interests of morality and religion, his passions are inflamed, and his mind polluted to such a degree, that he carries the pernicious lessons of the temple, or the festival, into all the walks of private life. His very religion becomes his greatest bane, and where he should have drank of the water of life, he swallows the poison that infallibly destroys him.

In conversation with a learned bramhŭn, in the year 1813, he acknowledged to the author, that, at present, reverence for the gods made no part of the attractions to the public festivals. One man celebrates a festival to preserve himself from disgrace, another to procure the applauses of his countrymen, and a third for the sake of the songs, dances, &c. This bramhun instanced cases of images being made without any reference to the rules of the shastră. At one place, a Hindoo, having prepared an image, at an expense which he could not meet, permitted it to be broken, and its head, arms, and legs to be trodden upon in the streets another, who had been thus disappointed, threw

the image into the water;-and a third, having made an enor mous image, had fastened it to a cart, but on the first motion of the vehicle, the head of the idol had fallen off, and the rest of the image was permitted to lie in the street as a dead carcase. I give these instances, to confirm what I have already said, that it is not devotion that leads the Hindoo to the temple, but a licentious appetite; and to afford another proof, that idolatry always tends to sink, but never to raise its votaries. In the account of Kalēē (vol. iii.), the reader will find a fact respecting the execution of two Hindoos, who, when under sentence of death, became Roman Catholics, in pure revenge upon Kallee, who did not, as she was believed to have done in favour of many others, protect them in the act of robbery. One of the pundits who assisted me in this work begged, if I mentioned this fact, that I would assure the English reader, that although this goddess assisted public robbers, she always informed them that they must suffer hereafter for their crimes, though she did assist them in their perpetration.

The Reverend Mr. Maurice seems astonished that a people so mild, so benevolent, so benignant as the Hindoos, "who (quoting Mr. Orme) shudder at the very sight of blood," should have adopted so many bloody rites. But are these Hindoos indeed so humane;-these men, and women too, who drag their dying relations to the banks of the river at all seasons, day and night, and expose them to the heat and cold in the last agonies of death, without remorse:-who assist men to commit self-murder, encouraging them to swing with hooks in their backs, to pierce their tongues and sides, to cast themselves on naked knives, to bury themselves alive, throw themselves into rivers, from precipices, and under the cars of their idols:who murder their own children, by burying them alive,

"Instances are not unfrequent, where persons afflicted with loathsome and incurable diseases, have caused themselves to be buried alive."—Asiatie Researches, vol. vii, p. 257.

h

throwing them to the alligators, or hanging them up alive in trees for the ants and crows before their own doors, or by sacrificing them to the Ganges-who burn alive, amidst savage shouts, the heartbroken widow, by the hands of her own son, and with the corpse of a deceased fatheri;—who every year butcher thousands of animals, at the call of superstition, covering themselves with their blood, consigning their carcases to the dogs, and carrying their heads in triumph through the streets?-Are these the "benignant Hindoos?" -a people who have never erected a charity-school, an alms'house, or an hospital; who suffer their fellow creatures to perish for want before their very doors, refusing to administer to their wants while living, or to inter their bodies, to prevent their being devoured by vultures and jackals, when dead; who, when the power of the sword was in their hands, impaled alive, cut off the noses, the legs, and arms of culprits; and inflicted punishments exceeded only by those of the followers of the mild, amiable, and benevolent Booddhŭ in the Burman empire! and who very often, in their acts of pillage,

h I fancy this is done when the child is born with bad omens, or is supposed to be afflicted by some evil spirit.

i At Benares and near Buxar numerous brick monuments have been erected to perpetuate the memory of women who have been burnt alive with the bodics of their deceased husbands.

It is well known, that the Burmaus are the followers of Booddhu, whose principal aim was to excite in mankind a horror of shedding blood, and of destroying animal life. The following facts will show how much humanity there is among a people far exceeding the Hindoos in their care not to injure whatever contains life Mr. F. Carey thus writes to his friends in Bengal :-" I will now relate what has taken place in this single town of Rangoon since my residence in this country, which does not exceed four years. Some of the criminals I saw executed with my own eyes; the rest I saw immediately after execution. One man had melted lead poured down his throat, which immediately burst out from the neck, and various parts of the body. Four or five persons, after being nailed through their hands and feet to a scaffold, had first their tongues cut out, then their mouths slit open from ear to ear, then their

murder the plundered, cutting off their limbs with the most cold-blooded apathy, turning the house of the murdered into a disgusting shambles !- Some of these cruelties, no doubt, arise out of the religion of the Hindoos, and are the poisoned fruits of superstition, rather than the effects of natural disposition but this is equally true respecting the virtues which have been so lavishly bestowed on this people. At the call of the shastrů the Hindoo gives water to the weary traveller during the month Voishakhŭ; but he may perish at his door without pity or relief from the first of the following month, no reward being attached to such an act after these

ears cut off, and finally their bellies ripped open. Six people were crucified in the following manner: their hands and feet were nailed to a scaffold; their eyes were then extracted with a blunt hook; and in this conditiou they were left to expire: two died in the course of four days; the rest were liberated, but died of mortification on the sixth or seventh day. Four persons were crucified, viz. not nailed, but tied with their hands and feet stretched out at full length, in an erect posture, in which they were to remain till death; every thing they wished to eat was ordered them, with a view to prolong their lives and misery. In cases like this, the legs and feet of the criminal begin to swell and mortify at the expiration of three or four days; sonte are said to live in this state for a fortnight, and expire at last from fatigue and mortification. Those which I saw were liberated at the end of three or four days. Another man had a large bamboo run through his belly, which put an immediate end to his existence. Two persons had their bellies ripped up, just sufficient to admit of the protrusion of a small part of the intestines; and after being secured by the hands and feet at full stretch with cords, were placed in an erect posture upon bamboo rafters, and set adrift in the river, to float up and down with the tide for public view. The number of those who have been beheaded I do not exactly recollect; but they must be somewhere between twenty and thirty. One man was sawn to death, by applying the saw to the shoulder bone, and sawing right down until the bowels gushed out. One woman was beat to death with a large cudgel.-These are most of the punishments I have seen and heard of during my stay in this place; but many other instances happened during my absence, which I have not related. As for the crimes for which these punishments were inflicted, 1 shall only add, the crimes of some deserved death, some were of a trivial nature, and some of the victims were quite innocent."

thirty days have expired. water, and build lodging-houses for pilgrims and travellers; but he considers himself as making a good bargain with the gods in all these transactions. It is a fact, that there is not a road in the country made by Hindoos except a few which lead to holy places; and had there been no future rewards held out for such acts of merit, even these would not have existed. Before the kŭlee-yoogŭ it was lawful to sacrifice cows; but the man who does it now, is guilty of a crime as heinous as that of killing a bramhun: he may kill a buffalo, however, and Doorga will reward him with heaven for it. A Hindoo, by any direct act, should not destroy an insect, for he is taught that God inhabits even a fly but it is no great crime if he should permit even his cow to perish with hunger; and he beats it without mercy, though it be an incarnation of Bhugŭvŭtēē-it is enough, that he does not really deprive it of life; for the indwelling deity feels no stroke but that of death. The Hindoo will utter falsehoods that would knock down an ox, and will commit perjuries so atrocious and disgusting, as to fill with horror those who visit the courts of justice; but he will not violate his shastrů by swearing on the waters of the Ganges.

He will make roads, pools of

Idolatry is often also the exciting cause of the most abominable frauds. Several instances are given in this work: one will be found in vol. iii. p. 90, and another respecting an image found under ground by the raja of Nŭdēēya, in vol. iii, p. 157.

Indeed keeping gods is a trade among the Hindoos: the only difficulty to be overcome, is that of exciting attention to the image. To do this, the owner of the image frequently goes from village to village, to call the attention of the neighbour

I Plutarch says, that Romulus, when he instituted the Ludi Consuales, to surprise the Sabine virgins, gave out, that he had discovered the altar of the god Consus hid under ground; which discovery attracted great multitudes to the sacrifice.