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one of the councillors of the general, was at Ouché, charged with keeping order among the Mahometans there. As he found it "within his power to give his attention to the Torgouths, I ordered "him to repair to Ily and do his best for their solid settlement. "At the same time I did not neglect any of the precautions that "seemed to me necessary. I ordered Chouhédé to raise small forts "and redoubts at the most important points, and to cause all the passes to be carefully guarded; and I enjoined on him the duty of "himself getting ready the necessary provisions of every kind inside "those defences. The Torgouths arrived, and on arriving found "lodgings ready, means of sustenance, and all the conveniences they "could have found in their own proper dwellings. This is not all. "Those principal men among them who had to come personally to do me homage had their expenses paid, and were honourably con"ducted, by the imperial post-road, to the place where I then was. "I saw them; I spoke to them; I invited them to partake with me "in the pleasures of the chase; and, at the end of the number of "days appointed for this exercise, they attended me in my retinue as "far as to Gé-hol. There I gave them a ceremonial banquet and "made them the customary presents. It was at this Gé-hol, in "those charming parts where Kang-hi, my grandfather, made himself an abode to which he could retire during the hot season, at the same time that he thus put himself in a situation to be able to "watch with greater care over the welfare of the peoples that are "beyond the western frontiers of the Empire; it was, I say, in those "lovely parts that, after having conquered the whole country of the "Eleuths, I had received the sincere homages of Tchering and his "Tourbeths, who alone among the Eleuths had remained faithful to 66 me. One has not to go many years back to touch the epoch of "that transaction. The remembrance of it is yet recent. And now "-who could have predicted it ?-when there was the least possible "room for expecting such a thing, and when I had no thought of it, "that one of the branches of the Eleuths which first separated itself "from the trunk, those Torgouths who had voluntarily expatriated "themselves to go and live under a foreign and distant dominion, "these same Torgouths are come of themselves to submit to me of "their own good will; and it happens that it is still at Gé-hol, not "far from the venerable spot where my grandfather's ashes repose, "that I have the opportunity, which I never sought, of admitting "them solemnly into the number of my subjects."

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Annexed to this general memoir there were some notes, also by the Emperor, one of them being that description of the sufferings of the Torgouths on their march, and of the miserable condition in which they arrived at the Chinese frontier, which De Quincey has quoted at p. 417. Annexed to the memoir there is also a letter from P. Amiot, one of the French Jesuit missionaries, dated "Pe-king, 15th October 1773," containing a comment on the memoir by a certain Chinese scholar and mandarin, Yu-min-tchoung, who had been charged by the Emperor with the task of seeing the narrative properly preserved in four languages in a monumental form. It is from this Chinese com

ment on the Imperial Memoir that there is the extract at p. 418 as to the miserable condition of the fugitives.

On a comparison of De Quincey's splendid paper with the Chinese documents, several discrepancies present themselves; the most important of which perhaps are these :-(1) In De Quincey's paper it is Kien-long himself who first descries the approach of the vast Kalmuck horde to the frontiers of his dominions. On a fine morning in the early autumn of 1771, we are told, being then on a hunting expedition in the solitary Tartar wilds on the outside of the great Chinese Wall, and standing by chance at an opening of his pavilion to enjoy the morning sunshine, he sees the huge sheet of mist on the horizon, which, as it rolls nearer and nearer, and its features become more definite, reveals camels, and horses, and human beings in myriads, and announces the advent of etc. etc.! In Kien-long's own narrative he is not there at all, having expected indeed the arrival of the Kalmuck host, but having deputed the military and commissariat arrangements for the reception of them to his trusted officer Chouhédé; and his first sight of any of them is when their chiefs are brought to him, by the imperial post-road, to his quarters a good way off, where they are honourably entertained, and whence they accompany him to his summer residence of Gé-hol. (2) De Quincey's closing account of the monument in memory of the Tartar Transmigration which Kienlong caused to be erected, and his copy of the fine inscription on the monument, are not in accord with the Chinese statements respecting that matter. "Mighty columns of granite and brass erected by the Emperor Kien-long near the banks of the Ily" is De Quincey's description of the monument. The account given of the affair by the mandarin Yu-min-tchoung, in his comment on the Emperor's Memoir,

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is very different. "The year of the arrival of the Tourgouths," he says, "chanced to be precisely that in which the Emperor was cele"brating the eightieth year of the age of his mother the EmpressDowager. In memory of this happy day his Majesty had built on "the mountain which shelters from the heat (Pi-chou-chan) a vast "and magnificent miao, in honour of the reunion of all the followers "of Fo in one and the same worship; it had just been completed "when Oubaché and the other princes of his nation arrived at Gé-hol. "In memory of an event which has contributed to make this same year for ever famous in our annals, it has been his Majesty's will to "erect in the same miao a monument which should fix the epoch of "the event and attest its authenticity; he himself composed the "words for the monument and wrote the characters with his own "hand. How small the number of persons that will have an oppor"tunity of seeing and reading this monument within the walls of the temple in which it is erected!" Moreover the words of the monumental inscription in De Quincey's copy of it are hardly what Kienlong would have written or could have authorised. "Wandering sheep who had strayed away from the Celestial Empire in the year 1616" is the expression in De Quincey's copy for that original secession of the Torgouth Tartars from their eastern home on the Chinese borders for transference of themselves far west to Russia, which was

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repaired and compensated by their return in 1771 under their Khan Oubaché. As distinctly, on the other hand, the memoir of Kien-long refers the date of the original secession to no farther back than the reign of his own grandfather, the Emperor Kang-hi, when Ayouki, the grandfather of Oubaché, was Khan of the Torgouths, and induced them to part company with their overbearing kinsmen the Eleuths, and seek refuge within the Russian territories on the Volga. In the comment of the Chinese mandarin on the Imperial memoir the time is more exactly indicated by the statement that the Torgouths had remained "more than seventy years" in their Russian settlements when Oubaché brought them back. This would refer us to about 1700, or, at farthest, to between 1690 and 1700, for the secession under Ayouki.

The discrepancies are partly explained by the fact that De Quincey followed Bergmann's account,-which account differs avowedly in some particulars from that of the Chinese Memoirs. In Bergmann, I find, the original secession of the ancestors of Oubaché's Kalmuck horde from China to Russia is pushed back to 1616, just as in De Quincey. But, though De Quincey keeps by Bergmann when he pleases, he takes liberties with Bergmann too, intensifies Bergmann's story throughout, and adds much to it for which there is little or no suggestion in Bergmann. For example, the incident which De Quincey introduces with such terrific effect as the closing catastrophe of the march of the fugitive Kalmucks before their arrival on the Chinese frontier, the incident of their thirst-maddened rush into the waters of Lake Tengis, and their wallow there in bloody struggle with their Bashkir pursuers,-has no basis in Bergmann larger than a few slight and rather matter-of-fact sentences. As Bergmann himself refers here and there in his narrative to previous books, German or Russian, for his authorities, it is just possible that De Quincey may have called some of these to his aid for any intensification or expansion of Bergmann he thought necessary. My impression, however, is that he did nothing of the sort, but deputed any necessary increment of his Bergmann materials to his own lively imagination.-D. M.

CEYLON 1

THERE is in the science and process of colonisation, as in every complex act of man, a secret philosophy which is first respected through results, and first expounded by experience. Here, almost more than anywhere else, nature works in fellowship with man. Yet all nature is not alike suited to the purposes of the early colonist; and all men are not alike qualified for giving effect to the hidden capacities of nature. One system of natural advantages is designed to have a long precedency of others; and one race of men is selected and sealed for an eternal preference in this function of colonising to the very noblest of their brethren. As colonisation advances, that ground becomes eligible for culture, that nature becomes full of promise, which in earlier stages of the science was not so; because the dreadful solitude becomes continually narrower under the accelerated diffusion of men, which shortens the space of distance-under the strides of nautical science, which shortens the time of distance and under the eternal discoveries of civilisation, which combat with elementary nature. Again, in the other element of colonisation, races of men become known for what they are; the furnace has tried them all; the truth has justified itself; and if, as at some great memorial review of armies, some solemn armilustrum, the colonising nations since 1500 were

1 From Blackwood for November 1843, where it appeared as a review of "Ceylon and its Capabilities. By J. W. Bennett, Esq., F.L. S. London, 1843." Reprinted by De Quincey in 1859 in the twelfth volume of his Collected Writings.-M.

now by name called up, France would answer not at all; Portugal and Holland would stand apart with dejected eyes -dimly revealing the legend of Fuit Ilium; Spain would be seen sitting in the distance, and, like Judæa on the Roman coins, weeping under her palm-tree in the vast regions of the Orellana; whilst the British race would be heard upon every wind, coming on with mighty hurrahs, full of power and tumult, as some "hail-stone chorus," 1 and crying aloud to the five hundred millions of Burmah, China, Japan, and the infinite Islands, to make ready their paths before them. Already a ground-plan, or ichnography, has been laid down of the future Colonial Empire. In three centuries, already some outline has been sketched rudely adumbrating the future settlement destined for the planet, some infant castrametation has been marked out for the future encampment of nations. Enough has been already done to show the course by which the tide is to flow, to prefigure for languages their proportions, and for nations to trace their distribution.

In this movement, so far as it regards man - in this machinery for sifting and winnowing the merits of racesthere is a system of marvellous means, which by its very simplicity masks and hides from us the wise profundity of its purpose. Oftentimes, in wandering amongst the inanimate world, the philosopher is disposed to say: this plant, this mineral, this fruit, is met with so often, not because it is better than others of the same family; perhaps it is worse; but because its resources for spreading and naturalising itself are, by accident, greater than theirs. That same analogy he finds repeated in the great drama of colonisation. It is not, says he pensively to himself, the success which measures the merit. It is not that Nature or that Providence has any final cause at work in disseminating these British children over every zone and climate of the earth. Oh no! far from it! But it is the unfair advantages of these Islanders which carry them thus potently ahead. Is it so indeed? Philosopher, you are wrong. Philosopher, you are envious. You speak Spanish, philosopher, or even French. Those advantages which you suppose to disturb the equities of the case— were they not products of British energy? Those twenty-five 1 "Hail-Stone Chorus" :-Handel's Israel in Egypt.

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