ART. VII.-Recollections of the Last Ten Years, passed in occasional Residences and Journeyings in the Valley of the Mississippi, from Pitsburg and the Missouri to the Gulf of Mexico, and from Florida to the Spanish Fron- tier; in a Series of Letters to the Rev. James Flint, of Salem, Massachusetts. By Timothy Flint, Principal of the Seminary of Rapide, Louisiana VIII. Osservazioni Semi-serie di un Esule sull' Inghilterra IX.-Considérations Politiques sur l'Epoque actuelle, addressées à l'Auteur anonyme de l'Ouvrage intitulé Histoire de Page I.-1. Sketches of the Philosophy of Apparitions; and an attempt to trace such Illusions to their Physical Causes. By Samuel Hibbert, M.D., F.R.S.E. II.-1. An Inquiry into the Poor-Laws and Surplus Labour, and their Mutual Reaction. By William Day, Esq. 2. Cottage Allotments in some Parishes of North Hamp- shire. By the Rev. Lovelace B. Wither III.-1. The Traveller's Oracle, or Maxims for Locomotion. By 2. The Horse and Carriage Oracle. By John Jervis, an V.-Zohrab the Hostage. By the Author of Hajji Baba' VI. The History of Charlemagne. By G. P. R. James, Esq. 421 VII.-Mémoires de Louis XVIII., recueillis et mis en ordre par VIII. Sir Edward Seaward's Narrative of his Shipwreck, and consequent Discovery of certain Islands in the Caribbean Sea; with a Detail of many extraordinary and highly interesting Events in his Life; from the years 1733 to 1749. Edited by Miss Jane Porter IX.-1. Remarks on the Statistics and Political Institutions of the United States, with some Observations on the Ecclesiastical System of America, her Sources of Reve- 2. The Refugee in America; a Novel. By Mrs. Trollope 507 X.-1. La Fayette et la Révolution de 1830. Histoire des Choses et des Hommes de Juillet, par B. Sarrans le Jeune, Ancien rédacteur an chef du Courrier des Elec- teurs, Aide-de-camp de La Fayette jusqu'au 26 Décembre, 2. How it must work. By Henry Francis Lord Teynham. 3. A Plan of Church Reform, &c. By Lord Henley. 4. Safe and Easy Steps towards an Efficient Church Re- form: one more efficient than that of Lord Henley. By a Clergyman of the Church of England. 5. Remarks upon Church Reform, and Sequel to Remarks upon Church Reform. With Observations upon the Plan proposed by Lord Henley. By the Rev. Edward 6. Church Reform. By a Churchman. 7. Substance of a Speech delivered at a Meeting of Evan- THE QUARTERLY REVIEW. ART. I.-Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan. By Lieut. Colonel James Tod. Vols. I. and II. 4to. London. 1830-32. IN a N all nations poets have been the first historians. The annals of every race are lost in the mists of a mythic or fabulous period, in which the dimly-humanised forms of the gods, or men magnified by the uncertain haze to preter-human stature, people the long-receding and shadowy realin. Even where that is not the case, over every event, and every character, is thrown a poetic and imaginative colouring; the bard-chronicler never abandons the privilege, the attribute of his art; and until history has condescended to the sober march of prose, it does not restrain itself from the licence of fiction, or assume the authority of truth, And when at length this division of labour takes place, when the poet recedes into his own province, and leaves the domain of real life to a colder hand, the legends of former times, under his magic influence, have either assumed a sacred character, or become so completely incorporated with the popular belief, that the earliest prose historian, who of course could more easily have disengaged the latent truth from its fictitious or allegoric veil, is restrained by religious awe, or labours in vain to disenchant the fond and willing credulity of his countrymen. The mythic narrative therefore remains undisturbed; the reverential historian allows the gods to stand at the head of the genealogical tree; he relates, with grave fidelity, the established wonders of the olden time.' Sometimes (so Niebuhr would persuade us has been the case as to the Roman kings) the epic of the bard becomes the groundwork, or rather the actual substance of the national history, and retains its primeval authority-to be first called in question by the severer scepticism of a more intellectual age. The native annals of India seem to present one great mythic period; in all their vast literature, history, properly speaking, has hitherto appeared almost unknown. Among her Homers and Platos no Herodotus arose, to collect from the records of her priesthood, or her living traditions, a consistent and harmonious narrative of the rise and progress of her various races. We are left to trace the shadowy outline of her earlier fortunes in the marvellous legends of the Puranas, or the wild creations of the two great epic poems, authorities, which being far more mythic, and and imaginative, are less capable of furnishing even the groundwork for a credible history of India, than Homer and the Cyclic poets for that of Greece. Nor does this cloud of fable brood only over the most remote and inaccessible regions of her antiquity; the same spirit haunts the whole course of her annals: when we hope to be in some degree disembarrassed from this intimate association of things divine and human, to have reached the domain of unmingled mortal men, some fresh Avatar or incarnation of the Deity breaks forth; and we encounter a new race of mythological personages-a Crishna, or a Rama, or a Budh, with all their attendant demi-gods. Even more substantial beings, of whose actual existence we can scarcely doubt,-kings and founders of regular dynasties,-the poets themselves, Valmiki and Vyasa, the authors of the Ramayana and Mahâ-bârat,-are, as it were, unrealized, and refined into creatures of an intermediate order between gods and men. In short, all is, in Indian phrase, mava; poetic illusion floats over the whole: if truths severe ' do indeed lie hid under the allegorical veil, they are so fantastically in fairy fiction drest,' that we almost despair of ever discovering their hidden secrets, or of obtaining the key to their vast system of poetical hieroglyphics. The only work which can be called history, in the European sense of the word, is the Rájá Taringini, the Annals of Cashmir; of which we have an abstract, by Mr. Horace Wilson*, in the fifteenth volume of the Asiatic Researches. Even this work, although its chronology, at least traced back to a certain period, is consistent and satisfactory, and its regular succession of kings has every appearance of historic authenticity, wanders at times into poetic legend; and some of those events, which are of the most striking importance and interest-the religious revolutions -assume something of an allegoric or mythological form. Notwithstanding, however, this drawback, and although the history of Cashmir, for the most part, confines itself within the narrow limits of that kingdom-though its long line of kings pass over the mind, and disappear from the remembrance, almost as rapidly as the crowned forms which the witches conjure up before the bewildered eyes of Macbeth—the Rájá Tarangini is not only intrin The election of this gentleman to the Sanscrit Professorship at Oxford reflects the highest credit on that learned body, and is of the fairest promise to the cultivation of oriental literature. In every branch of Hindu knowledge, in poetry, in philology, in history, Mr. Wilson is equally distinguished; and among our younger Indian scholars, unquestionably stands pre-eminent and alone. Oxford has at once set itself at the head of this branch of literature, cultivated, as we have shown in a former article, with so much zeal and activity in many of the foreign universities. All that is valuable in Sanscrit antiquities will now issue, under the ablest auspices, from the Clarendon press, instead of being brought back to this country from Bonn, and Berlin, and Paris. sically |