swarm of desperate adventurers, debtors, and bankrupts, who went to repair their ruined fortunes by the plunder which was to be made under sanction of the law. These wretches, upon their arrival at Calcutta, assumed the character of attorneys, officers of the court, servants of the judges, &c. &c.; and are described to have spread themselves over the fertile provinces of Bengal, Bahar, and Orissa, like the locusts over Egypt, carrying with them ruin and desolation, breathing a spirit of discord and litigation wherever they went, opening public shops to supply a redress for every imagined wrong, or rather to gratify the malevolence and resentment of every restless and revengeful spirit, instigating slaves to bring actions of assault against their masters, and culprits to recover on the judges of the country for false imprisonment, and reviving causes which had long been terminated; for, what seems incredible, the judges gave the law a retrospective force, and property was disposed of, and crimes adjudged and punished by positive laws, which were not in being, in that country, at the time of the transactions. The confusion that followed from all this is hardly to be conceived. On the principle that all men are equal, writs were issued out indiscriminately against persons of every description, no matter what their sex, rank, or consideration in the country. Gentoos, who think themselves polluted by the touch of any but those of their own particular sect, were personally arrested, thrown into a common dungeon with malefactors of every description, and there left with the alternative either of

perishing with hunger, or offending against their religion by eating of food prepared by profane hands. The harams, the apartments of the females, which are held sacred in that country, and which it is profane in any male to approach, were violently forced open by bailiffs, and the bodies of the women arrested; an indignity which they complain of as more cruel than death itself. Judges were seized in the administration of justice, and torn, with circumstances of contempt, from their tribunals in the sight of the prisoners they were trying. The administration of justice was at a stand; murders were committed with impunity; and the country judges refused to punish the murderers, lest they should draw down on themselves the severity of our Supreme Court by some error in their proceedings, or by interfering with the English jurisdiction. The petition of the Gentoos concludes in these words, "If (which God forbid !) it should so happen that this our petition should not be accepted, those amongst us who have power and ability, discarding all affections to our families, will fly to any quarter we can: whilst the remainder, who have no means or ability, giving themselves up with pious resignation to their evil fate, will sit down in expectation of their death. After this, let the soil of the country remain, and the court of justice! Let the court of justice remain upon the earth, or the earth cover it!" Though I have read a great many of the papers and publications upon this subject, yet, as I have not seen any thing written in defence of the judges, I ought to suspend my judgment upon their conduct, but with

very great allowances for exaggeration and misrepresentation, they still seem very guilty.

I must now take my leave of you.

Your affectionate brother,

SAMUEL ROMILLY.

LETTER IX.

Gray's Inn, May 4. 1781.

It gave me great pain, my dear Roget, to find you in your last letter speak in so disconsolate a manner of life, as if you had lost all relish for any of its enjoyments. I own I did not expect it; for, though I am sure no one has felt your afflictions more sensibly than I, yet I have often pleased myself with thinking that your life was not destitute of enjoyment; for, knowing that ambition and the tumultuous pleasures of the world never had charms for you, I confess I thought I still saw room for many happy hours in a life of quiet and obscurity, with the company of a few friends and our dear Catherine for the partner of your exile; the prospect of educating your son. the purest intellectual pleasures are poisoned by bodily pain; but you have flattered us, or you are free from that evil. You speak of your life as precarious; but who is certain of existence till tomorrow? and what thinking being would have the idea of death less present to his mind than you say it is to yours? You know, my dear Roget, how we always exaggerate to ourselves our past happiness and our present misery: so much, that

above all, in

I know that

were we to live over again some of the most envied moments of our past life, we should be surprised to find that that happiness which, seen through the delusive medium of time, appeared with so many charms, was, in reality, possessed of so few; and yet it is by comparisons with this distant magnified happiness that we add to the bitterness of all our present sorrows.

You ask me how I spend my time: in a manner so uniformly the same, that a journal of one day is a journal of all. At six o'clock, or sooner, I rise, go into the cold bath, walk to Islington to drink a chalybeate water (from which I have found great benefit), return and write or read till ten, then dress and go to Mr. Spranger's, where I study till three, dine in Frith Street, and afterwards return to Mr. Spranger's, where I remain till nine, or else stay in Frith Street, and read with my brother and Jane. This is the history of every day, with little other variation than that of my frequently attending the courts of justice in the morning, instead of going to Mr. Spranger's, and of my often passing my afternoons at one of the Houses of Parliament; for I have lately been so fortunate as to find the means of gaining admittance to both Houses whenever I choose. Indeed I am grown as great a politician as Appia was, though it is not mine, as it was his, favourite topic of conversation. "Peace is my dear delight,” and peace and our politics are incompatible. My father is still as warm an advocate as ever for the Ministry*, and I as deeply affected as ever with the

*The administration of Lord North.

miseries and disgrace they have brought upon my country. The moment the conversation turns upon public affairs, I impose it upon myself as a law not to take part; and yet I am often weak enough to let the subject carry me away by degrees, in which case our conversation never ends without my sincerely repenting, and reproaching myself with want of firmness in not keeping my resolution. Mr. Spranger is as warm a friend of the opposition as my father of the court; too warm a friend for me to concur with him; for, though I believe many of the minority to be as disinterested and truly patriotic as any men in the kingdom, yet some of the leaders of the party are such, that one must be prejudiced to blindness not to see that their only view is to raise themselves upon the ruins of the party they oppose. At Mr. Spranger's I pass for a ministerialist, and at home for a patriot-an epithet not very honourable in the sense in which it is used.

As for political news, we have none, except that the minority are very angry with Lord North for the terms upon which he has made the loan of this year, and for his distribution of it among the subscribers. I should not be very intelligible, I fear, if I were to endeavour to explain what those terms were; suffice it to say, that they were so advantageous to the subscribers, and, consequently, so disadvantageous to the public, that the next day after they were declared, they bore a premium of 10 per cent., and have remained ever since at a premium of between 10 and 7 per cent. The distribution is complained of as having been