subject them, as Captain Head justly remarks, to numerous disadvantages. The opposing army could have the command of stores, battering, and all other artillery, reinforcements of men, and supplies of every description, which could be thrown on the point, either in front or rear, where they could most annoy the enemy, or benefit our armies. The five rivers that intersect the Penjab, and several of which are navigable to a considerable height, would afford immense advantages to the Power possessed of the water. None of our readers can have forgot the naval armament of Alexander the Great on these rivers. Native vessels of seventy-five tons still, we are told, navigate the river at Lahore. In Mr Hamilton's time, flat-bottomed vessels of two hundred tons navigated the river to Bakhor, Multan, and Lahore, and it is only the unsettled state of the country since that time which has interrupted its navigation. For nearly a thousand miles up from its entrance, at which point the chief difficulty occurs, there is never less than fifteen or twenty feet of water, according to Captain Head, or twelve, according to General Malcolm. It cannot be doubted that the power of steam would be a new and valuable auxiliary added to our other means of defence on our northern frontier; the more so as it would not be possessed by the enemy.

We have no design to enter more deeply into the question of northern invasion, which would require many more minute enquiries and details, geographical and military, than we have leisure for; but we may be allowed to doubt whether the alarm it sometimes excites, be not a remnant of a feeling natural enough in past times, but hardly justified at present. Since Bonaparte alarmed us from Egypt, and even since that great warrior and the Russian Alexander planned the march of an army to the East, the East itself is changed. At the former of these periods, the escape of a few French frigates beyond the Cape was a matter of reasonable concern. The monarch of Mysore was brooding over his real or imaginary wrongs, and ardent for vengeance. His troops, his very name, were still formidable. Armies were ready to start up at the appearance of a slight European force, round which they might rally. The Nizam was uncertain; even the Nabob of the Carnatic was hardly to be depended upon. At the second period, the whole civilized world, England and America excepted, might be considered as directed by Bonaparte. After the peace of Tilsit, he

* Hamilton's New Account of the East Indies, vol. ii. p. 124. London: 1744.

seemed to be on the road to universal conquest. The nations of the earth quailed at his name. Even beyond the civilized world, Russia, Turkey, and Persia were believed to be under his influence. This brought the second Chengiz Khan to the very borders of India; and there the Mahratta empire was still erect; the Peshwa, Sindia, Holkar, were all great powers. A dangerous combination of native princes, and of idle soldiers of fortune, might have aided the adventurous warrior, who could contrive to enter India with but a moderate force from the north. The case is now changed. The appearance of even a strong army in India, though it would attract a few adventurers to join it, could command the alliance of no powerful prince. Even where the princes remain, the military power, with a few unimportant exceptions, is no longer in their hands. The organization of the country is entirely with the English. Time would not be allowed the invader to embody and discipline a native force. The whole brunt of the war would fall upon the original invaders, who would be daily mown away by the sword, and the climate, and fatigue. Shut out entirely from supplies by sea, the precarious reinforcements sent by a long line of some thousand miles of land communication, if they ever arrived, could never be expected to maintain their numbers or vigour. With a brave, active, and numerous enemy on every side of them, even partial victory would only lead them nearer to ruin. Against barbarians the attempt would be dangerous; against an intelligent, civilized enemy, full of resources, we consider it, in the present state of India and of Europe, as a mere dream. The dangers of India are internal, not external, and must be guarded against by good government and an enlightened policy.

Although Captain Head professes to have had the success of steam navigation principally in view in writing this volume, he has not confined himself to that object. The bulk of the work is composed of his Itinerary from India to Malta, embellished by a series of engravings, on a large scale, of the most remarkable scenery and antiquities and antiquities on the route, beginning at Bombay, continued up the Red Sea and through Egypt, and finishing at Malta. They are chiefly occupied with the eternal monuments of Egyptian labour and art, accompanied by illustrations, either collected on the spot, or drawn from the works of former travellers. The work will be found useful, not only to overland travellers, but to such as confine themselves to the tour of Egypt, which has now become as common an object of foreign travel, as a visit to France or Italy was but fifty years ago.

VOL. LVII. NO, CXVI.

Y

ART. III.-1. Ouvrages de M. Jules Janin. 16 vols. 12mo. Paris: 1832.

2. Euvres Completes de Victor Hugo. 12 vols. 8vo. Paris: 1832.

THE HE literature of France has certainly for the last three years exhibited a very remarkable spectacle. The most startling contradiction seems to exist between the theory and practice of the more distinguished of its literary men ;-between the principles by which they feel and admit that literature must be guided, and the actual results by which they illustrate those principles. Nowhere has the complaint been more loudly and generally urged than in France, that the spirit of selfishness, the want of religious convictions, the discordant and conflicting views of morals, the cynical and licentious tone which pervade its lighter literature, are destructive to every thing profound or permanent. Nowhere is the necessity of infusing into it a better spirit more eloquently inculcated, or the importance of belief as the basis of every thing great, either in thought or action, more forcibly stated. Yet, alas ! romance follows romance, one play presses on the heels of another; and still the same chaos of opinion is exhibited-still the ties which form the cement of society are assailed-still the faith which for eighteen hundred years has survived the influence of time, the change of habits, feelings, and systems, and the drums and tramplings of 'many conquests,' is assailed and discountenanced as an obsolete and effete principle, no longer capable of vivifying, directing, or comforting the heart, and which must give way to a newer and more perfect revelation; and still these comfortless views continue to be embodied in scenes of licentious indulgence, or revolting atrocity, succeeding each other in a giddy bacchanalian whirl. The very spirit of the anarch old' seems for some time past to have presided over this branch of the literature of our neighbours; making it one vast contradiction, a bottomless gulf of incongruities, out of which at one time arises a spirit like ' an angel with bright hair dabbled in blood;' at another, the grinning aspect of a demon or a satyr; while every tone, from laughter to despair, even to the sound of hands together smote,' rises in confused and confusing accents from its gloomy margin. 'Diverse lingue orribile favelle, Gemiti di dolore, accenti d'ira,

Voci alte e fioche e suon di man con elle.'

If we could regard this state as any thing else but one of transition, as a step towards re-conducting the convictions and opinions of men into their ancient and natural channels, the prospect would indeed be sufficiently comfortless. At this moment the literature of France has neither the calm selfbalanced and tranquil dignity of a literature of belief, nor the resistless and overbearing strength which characterised the destructive literature of the eighteenth century. In truth, that literature might be called in one sense a literature of conviction. The destruction of what was then branded by the name of superstition, the belief in the boundless energies and inherent excellence of human nature,-philosophy, in short, falsely so called, was to that period the substitute for the religious convictions and deference to authority which had formed the constructive, or rather cementing principles, of the ages which had preceded it; the bond which for the time united men in the ranks of one crusade. The evils which were to be the result of this new illumination, the void which would be left in society when that terrible array should have struck its camp, and left desolate the country through which their march had lain, had not then been impressed upon the mind by that most unanswerable of teachers, Experience. No doubts then occurred to damp expectation; all were confident in the regeneration of mankind through this modern Apocalypse; actions and opinions tended to one clear and definite end-the overthrow and removal of all that was, to make way for that which was to come. So long as the walls of the old edifice were crashing around them, and temple and tower, crucifix and throne, one by one, went to the ground, all was harmony and gaiety among the workmen they saw and were delighted with their visible progress; the carpenter encouraged the goldsmith, and he that smoothed with the hammer him that smote on the anvil,-not now to build up, as of old, but to pull down; while Europe stood aghast at the tremendous power thus brought into play; and, as the echo of each successive downfall burst upon its ear, trembled within its courts and palaces, for the stability of its institutions.

But there comes a time when a more sobered and anxious feeling succeeds this first exuberance of confidence. The old edifice is in the dust; men have settled themselves down, as they best might, in the new mansion which has been run up in its room. But rocked and shaken by every wind, cold and comfortless by its very vastness, it is soon found neither to afford shelter nor security. Men begin to doubt their own wisdom, and to say in their hearts, as they compare what they have

done with what they have undone, the old was better.' Then comes in literature, too, a period of doubt, despondency, and complaint; contradiction and counteraction take the place of that unanimity which had given so terrible a grandeur to their concentrated efforts. When the crimes of the Revolution had shaken men's confidence in the native excellence of the human heart, even though controlled by philosophy, and when its misfortunes and sufferings had impressed upon them the necessity of some higher paraclete than the philosophy of the Encyclopedie, without at the same time suggesting to them how the void was to be filled;-when all began secretly to feel that there must be a deeper principle of reverence than mere utility, and yet each was left to follow in darkness such phantom of virtue or religion as his temperament, his fancy, or his interest might enable him to frame;-it was then that, according to the desponding confession of the most eminent of its ornaments at the present day, French literature, deprived at once of that central point and support which had been afforded it by the enthusiasm of general belief, and of that substitute for genuine faith which had for a time been supplied by the fanaticism of destruction, became at last an intellectual, as it had previously been a moral, nullity;—that limbo of conflicting tendencies, aimless speculations, and perverted ability, which we witness at this

moment.

But, gloomy as the state of matters may at first sight appear, yet considered (and in this light we certainly regard it) as an unavoidable step in the transition to better things, it is, after all, more desirable than the splendour of the imposing but destructive period which it has replaced. When the tide which has set so long towards the abyss of fatalism and materialism first begins to be met by a contrary current, no wonder if for some time men, who are as the barks upon its surface, are tossed up in convulsive heavings, or whirled round in restless eddies by the collision of the tides; nor if this state of commotion should appear to themselves more uncomfortable than the smoother current down which they had been hitherto hurried. It may be so for a time, but it is much to think that the tide has turned towards its legitimate channel, and that as it acquires strength, all this agitation must gradually disappear, and the stream of opinion flow on once more, unbroken and majestic, through healthier channels and towards a happier shore.

We are not disposed, therefore, to look even on this literary anarchy with an unmixed feeling of regret or dislike. It indicates at least a distrust of the wrong path, if not a progress towards the right. Never again, we think, by any convulsion of