such as it was his intention to present to the world. Consequently we may expect a very long period to elapse before we shall have such a Sanskrit lexicon as scholars would wish to possess. For who will take the trouble of preparing a complete verbal index to the Mahabharata or the Rámáyana, similar to Dammius' concordance to Homer, or even similar to the Index Virgilianus which fills the 4th volume of Heyne's edition? But although such expectations may never be fully realized, yet it may prove useful to keep in view the desirableness of great improvements. The critical study of the modern Indian languages must necessarily prove a Sisyphus's task, laborious in the extreme, and yet always ending in disappointment, until we shall possess a good Sanskrit grammar and a good Sanskrit lexicon, both of which we must yet number among the desiderata. Scholars living in Europe who study Sanskrit simply for its own sake, may not feel very keenly the inconveniences arising from the want of these two works. But scholars living in India, who wish to use the Sanskrit language as the key to Hinduism and to the modern Indian languages, are sorely discouraged by the great difficulties which still unnecessarily obstruct their path.

In the meanwhile it would be sheer ingratitude not to admire the surpassing merits of Professor Wilson, and the humbler, though not less useful achievements of Dr. Yates,-men who have not only themselves surmounted the greatest obstacles, but also removed them for ever out of the way of others. If their immediate successors should be able to accomplish one-half of what they have done, the next generation will find the study of Sanskrit nearly as easy as that of Latin. And although Sanskrit literature, as a whole, may justly be called a splendid monument of human folly rather than of human wisdom, yet the study of it must always be considered as important by all who wish to become thoroughly acquainted with the languages, the opinions, the habits, the character, and the religion of the hundred millions who inhabit India.

ART. V.-General principles and scheme of instruction and of discipline to be adopted in Brighton College, by the Rev. Principal, Arthur J. Macleane. "Brighton, 1847.

AMONGST the admitted inconveniences of a protracted residence in the East, separation and the disunion of domestic ties with most of our readers, will be regarded with the deepest horror. We can all readily bear witness to the manifold ills and vexations of India, great and small, connected with the heat and glare, the dust and confinement, the petty annoyances of the insect race, the destructive moisture, the obtrusive reptiles, and worst of all, the slow, midnight, wasting fever, and the quick, mysterious pestilence that walks in the noon day, and defies the power of science. But if we escape the heavier of these visitations or know them but as transient and occasional evils in our path, we can, after practice, afford to laugh at the remainder. Habit reconciles us to almost all the minor calamities to the discordant cries of the feathered or four-footed races to the unceasing murmur of the native bazar, the barbarous attempts at music, and the irritating bite of the pertinacious musquito. We find a remedy for almost everything in patience. But there is no remedy," says the Hindu poet, for a soul wounded by the sharp sword of separation," and many Indian residents are forced to acquiesce in the truth of this moral, during some period or other of their stay in the East. The advantages of improved communication have, however, done wonders for us. The days are past when Shore could twice leave his wife behind him, from a sheer dislike to expose her to the discomforts of the voyage. Our ladies and our merchants avail themselves of our monthly steamers with less hesitation than, three generations ago, they would have undertaken a voyage from Leith to Blackwall. The Bay of Biscay, is probably the worst feature in the journey. The Nile packet and the canal boat are fraught with troubles of no greater magnitude than many must have endured in a crowded Rhine steamer, or in a lumbering French diligence and the fancied perils of the desert are transformed into the unpleasant reality of a jolting of some eighteen hours' duration, in the inside of a regular London-built van. There is neither romance nor danger in the overland trip, and Indian wives and children, return home, re-embark, and are landed at Garden Reach, or Bombay Harbour, with far more regularity and with less of hope disappointed on the part of the expectants, than a hun

dred years ago would have been the case in a voyage from Edinburgh or from Exeter to the great Metropolis.

The parting of husband and wife, allayed as it is by the certainty of a quick passage, and the prospect of regular mutual correspondence every fifteen days, loses something of its bitterness. The sting has been deprived of one-half its force. But no improvements in steamers, no zeal or energy on the part of Lieut. Waghorn, no liberality on the part of any government, can obviate the necessity of educating our children in England and of thus losing sight of them for not the least important period of their lives. Possibly amidst the numerous improvements of the march of time, schools may eventually be established in the almost English climate and Alpine scenery of the hills, where the children of fathers toiling in the hot plains, shall be grounded in all the elements of a liberal English education. It may be that in the course of the next thirty years, our communication with Hill stations shall be so rapid and direct, that the train arriving at Agra or Calcutta, shall set down for the Christmas vacation the sons of soldiers, civilians, or merchants at their father's houses, with well nigh the same precision of the train from Slough or Harrow, which conveys an host of emancipated youths to the stations at Paddington or at Euston Square. But these benefits will be the lot of the generation that succeed us, and we are not quite sure, whether any institution, though established on the most approved principles, or removed from every noxious influence, could ever, to our satisfaction, fill the place of the time-honoured schools of England with their grey cloisters and their noble avenues of trees. To our minds there is an effect produced by the training of an English public school, combining all the tried and approved British principles, with, it may be, a few national prejudices, which in the end goes further to form the character in the mould of manliness, than any system of private tuition, however excellent, or than any practical Hofwyl, however admirably ruled by the presiding genius of a Fellenberg.

So then our sons must be educated, and for the present, they must be educated in England. In the belief that this subject will come home to the heart of every parent in India, we intend to devote a few of our pages to the exposition of the system, under which boys are brought up, the fruits they will probably bear, and the expense to which their fathers will be put.

What, we may first ask, is the common course with the children of European parents resident in India? The greater number are sent home between the ages of four and six, at the very time when the peculiarities of their character are being

developed, and the parent's guiding influence can least be spared. There is not much reason to apprehend that the climate's enervating influence has the effect of weakening the infantine mind, or of diminishing its quickness of perception. As far as we have the power of judging, English children in this country are almost as lively, and quite as intelligent and quick-sighted, as those born and bred at home. The love of motion and buoyancy seems often to defy the skyey influences and rules well nigh as forcibly in the closed house and under the waving punkah, as it would, if expatiating freely in the green fields and wooded avenues of an English country seat. Children, too, are not sent home as formerly, their only language, Hindustani, their sole accomplishment the power of giving abuse in a tongue whose capabilities in this respect are more than on a par with the dialects of the West. Many Indian born children are now dubashes, or two-voiced, in a literal sense. If they can give orders to the native servants with readiness, they are not debarred from a free use of their mother tongue, and the spelling, arithmetical and hymn books are at an early period, familiar to them in the Indian nursery, where

each little voice in turn

Some glorious truth proclaims,

Which sages would have died to learn,
Now taught by cottage dames.

But here the primitive education comes to a stand-still Interruption is caused by the illness or disinclination of the teacher, or by the voyage home, and we are afraid that many Indianborn children, by the side of their English school-fellows, will be seen to disadvantage at the first outset.

For this however there is no present cure. In the generality of cases the matter is as follows. The child of five years old is sent home when the climate's warning voice has spoken out in plain language. Under the sea breeze and with England in prospect, his constitution quickly throws off any traces of the wasting heat and damp of Bengal. One parent, it may be, accompanies the child. The other remains toiling at the desk, or rolling the ceaseless stone of regimental duty. But the husband and wife must not remain separate above one or at most two years, and the children must be consigned to the care of a relation. However excellent and watchful the substitute may be, the school must be soon encountered. At the very time when the parent's influence is most needed: when the pure and softening genius of the family hearth might counteract in some measure the impetuous and turbulent spirit engendered in the school: when, in short, the knowledge of good

and evil must be imparted, sometimes by slow but sure degrees, and sometimes in a few weeks or days-the youthful mind is left to fight its own battle, unaided, and we well know what the issue will eventually be. As certainly must evil triumph over good at first, as the well-aimed and vigorous lance of the Templar must overthrow in the first onset, the jaded steed of Ivanhoe, recovering from his wasting sickness, and worn out by his rapid journey.

Such however must be the course of things under the immutable law of our nature, and we can only hope that the period of trial and temptation may be shortened. But the private school once passed, a larger field may be opened: and it requires no lengthened argument to prove that the whole tenor of public schools has in the last 30 years undergone a change, which resembles not so much a partial transformation, as it does a whole and entire metamorphose. Those great and crying evils which drew forth the invectives of the shy and melancholy author of the Tirocinium, would now hardly be recognised in the precincts of that very Westminster, which had prompted his out-pourings. Licensed fagging and the ten-fold tyrannical oppression of unlicensed authority, have been divested of much that was undoubtedly hateful. The horrible traditions told in connection with the latter are not realised in this scrutinising age, and the exercise of the power, while regulated, does not exist to a greater extent than is absolutely necessary for the maintenance of discipline or for the very existence of the institution. There are well authenticated instances of tyranny at institutions where fagging is not licensed, which their most inveterate calumniator would never have laid at the door of public schools, and low, mean, and contemptible habits are engendered in the former places, such as Cowper himself would not have ranked in the prevalent evil influences of that nucleus of remarkable men, who were the cotemporaries of his school days at Westminster.

There are in fact two separate systems now gaining general in England. The one, a purified and reformed education at those old training stables, the public schools: the other, a course of study in a sort of preparatory college, such as that at Cheltenham and the Brighton one, of which we treat. The one is to comprehend all the advantages which may result from free intercourse in a republic of kings, governing themselves, but subject to the revision of a power as severe and watchful as the Ephori of Sparta, or the Justiza of Castile. The other aims at the attainment of a similar manliness of tone and healthiness of feeling, but with a more modified system of self-government: with less

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