canal, but for very many years my own personal friend also. When cordially supported by two such men, my success is not remarkable.

. . Among the acts for which I am most indebted to them is the appointment of Captain Baird Smith,* the distinguished author of 'Italian Irrigation,' whose name is familiar to this company as my successor in the direction of these works.

“I must, in conclusion, draw your attention to the interesting fact, that my first letter on the subject of the Ganges Canal was addressed to Mr. Colvin, private secretary to Lord Auckland; my last words, publicly spoken on the same subject are addressed to Mr. Colvin in his place as Lieutenant-Governor of these Provinces.

"Gentlemen, I have not another word to say."

This simple and manly speech was received with the warmest applause. Colonel Cautley's task was done; his triumph was complete. On the 20th of April he left Roorkee and proceeded to Calcutta to embark for England. At Calcutta he was greeted with public honors, and since his return home his services have been gratefully recognized. The victories of peace, harder and nobler though they be, are not, however, so loudly applauded as those of war. But happy he, who, at the close of active life, can look back on the successful accomplishment of such an object of his labor! Happy he, who, whether honored or neglected, remembered or forgotten, has the consciousness that ages hence he will still be by his works among the benefactors of mankind!

The canal could not have been left in better hands than those of Colonel Baird Smith, the successor of Sir Proby Cautley. Under his direction, it has advanced rapidly during the past year toward its full completion. The great portion of it already in operation has stood well the tests of actual service, and answered every expectation of its practical utility. In Colonel Smith's charge, the powers of the canal will be developed to their utmost for good.

A new era has commenced for India, an era of intelligent and liberal government,- of government which regards and cherishes the interests of the governed, and finds its own interests correlative with theirs. The internal resources of the country are developing; railroads are stretching inward

* Now Lieutenant-Colonel Baird Smith.

VOL. LXXXI. NO. 169.

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from its coast; the telegraph has brought its chief cities within an instant of one another; and Western energy is on all sides invigorating the country with a new life. Since the commencement of this year, the government has contracted for a loan of about fifteen millions of dollars solely for purposes of internal improvement.

Wise, upright, religious men, who recognize that the only justification of the English occupancy of India is that it should be for the good of her people, are doing all that lies within their power to remedy the evils of past misgovernment; to do away bad systems of revenue and taxation; to overcome the injurious misunderstandings which differences of birth, education, customs, language, and religion produce in the intercourse between rulers and ruled; to spread the blessings of education and of equal justice; and in every way to elevate the character and improve the condition of their subjects. Their progress is slow, meeting often with discouragements, but it is sure. Every thoughtful man who has travelled through India, and compared the condition of the states under native rule with that of the English dominions, would rejoice to know that every native power had fallen, and that the whole vast peninsula was brought under English rule. Miserable as have been the pretexts, and bloody as has been the course, of many of the English wars in India, they have been in the end of greater advantage to the conquered than to the conquerors. English conquests and annexations, even if undertaken from simple motives of ambition and lust of land, have not been disgraced by riveting the chains of old abuses under the false pretence of liberal government. The extension of free institutions does not mean in the East enlarging the area of slavery, whatever its meaning may be in the West.

But as one who has been in India long enough for observation cannot deny the general benefits which have resulted from the English rule, so he cannot deny, at the same time, that this rule has been administered in many cases with bitter consequences of evil. All that can be said as yet is, that there is a balance of good in its favor, and that this balance is daily increasing. The spirit of the supreme and the local

governments is gradually becoming enlightened, and the tone and character of both the civil and military services are improving. India is no longer looked upon, by those whose lives are cast in it, as a country to be fleeced. No rich nabobs come home now to be laughed at on the stage, ill-tempered, yellow with jaundice and curry, jingling their ill-made fortunes in their pockets. Such crimes as those upon which Burke poured out the vehement lightning of his indignation belong to a past age. Men stimulated to exertion by the vast field that is open before them, and encouraged by seeing the speedy good results of their work, devote talents, energy, life itself, to the service of India, and die in harness in the prime of their days and at the summit of usefulness, like Thomason and Elliott, or give up work and return home with health broken, but with the sense that it has been sacrificed in a good cause, like Cautley. The night in which false religion, tyranny, and war have enveloped India, is giving place to the day of Christianity, good government, and peace. We see, indeed, only the dawn of this new day. But the glow of the morning is in the East, and the first streaks of light are reflected brightly in the flowing waters of the great Ganges Canal.

ART. XII. CRITICAL NOTICES.

1.- Cleve Hall. By MISS SEWELL. New York: D. Appleton & Co. 1855.

THERE is perhaps nobody who writes stories now, (except Mr. Phoenix, our agreeable contemporary of "The California Pioneer,") who dares say at the end of a tale, "This story has no moral." The religious novel, for better or worse, takes the precedence in literature. And of the religion of novels, or the novels of religion, Miss Sewell has a right, from her length of service at the altar, to be described as the high-priestess.

It is a little remarkable, that, whereas everybody regarded her as the sole author of the books which were ascribed on the title-page to her and her brother, now, when " Cleve Hall" appears as her work only,

there should be such traces of another hand in it, as to make many readers think that she contributed the religious and didactic portions, and some other writer the melodramatic parts, - the smugglers, and, in general, the excitement. We doubt, on the whole, whether this suggestion is quite fair to Miss Sewell, who certainly has very remarkable power in story-telling, which, in a new walk, may assume such vivacity and spirit as to surprise even those who know her best. Now "Cleve Hall" certainly does exhibit her in a somewhat new walk. As if she had abandoned to Miss Yonge the especial "Church of England Novel," and with some reason, - she has written a book quite free from the peculiar machinery of the established church, a book which other Protestants can read with complacency. She has laid herself out, and as we think very successfully, in delineating different shades of character, all of which we should pronounce good, and even estimable, if we saw them in life, while very different from one another. Very much harder is this delineation than the cool subdivision which describes Mrs. Percival as a fool, Agatha Percival as weak and wicked, and Margaret Percival as self-denying, stained with no fault but a transient insubordination to a church which was represented in her own home by an unprincipled man. The peculiarities of "Cleve Hall" seem to us to constitute an improvement on the system pursued in Miss Sewell's other novels; and if this be not the best of her books in the novel-reader's eye, as perhaps it is, it is certainly the best intended, on any standard which includes an estimate of its moral.

2.

Maud, and other Poems. By ALFRED TENNYSON, Doctor of Civil Law and Poet Laureate. Boston: Ticknor and Fields.

1855.

ONE must hesitate before he accepts the wreath of the Poet Laureate; for from that moment it seems as if the poet most loved, even most petted, were given over, as if he were a politician, to be food for unkind, biting comment, which he would have been wholly spared had not the Queen chosen him as her own. We are certain we have heard unkind things said of "Maud," which would never have been said had Mr. Alfred Tennyson been a plain D. C. L.

Now there is no doubt that this poem is a charming rosary, strung of beads, very unlike one another, of playful, or sad, or meditative poetry, always poetry, and always natural, fresh, true, and new. Have we- if we study our rights carefully, have we any right to ask more than this? Has any one promised us that "Maud" shall have a

beginning, middle, and end? Has any one promised us that it should have a finished dénouement? Indeed, do we often get that same desideratum, a finished dénouement, in the every-day world, to which, after all, poetry is, in some sort, bound? Is not our impetuous demand for more of "Maud,”. -our blank disappointment that the curtain falls where it does, an evidence that we have gone to the opera for the story, and not for the music? We have our music, our fascinating poetry; the bits of it are all woven into our memories, so that we shall never lose them;—and shall we turn to the poet who has sung them to us, and say, "What happened then?" as if he were only a story-teller in a café at Broussa?

For people who want to have stories told them which shall bring out everybody and everything all square, we recommend constant perusal of the tales of these very Eastern story-tellers. We rejoice once a year in going through the Arabian Nights,—always with new joy, and always delighted at the end of each story to be told that "they passed a most comfortable and agreeable life, until they were visited by the terminator of delights, and the separator of companions." But we are catholic still in our tastes, and we do not think it fair to demand that Mr. Tennyson shall bring round his exquisite Maud and her lover to precisely such a haven. Indeed, as life itself is not all haven, we do not see why it should be necessary that he should bring them into any haven at all.

The private history of the poem is probably this. Mr. Tennyson seems to have conceived the idea of it, meaning that it should be at least a longer work, probably more elaborate, than he has made it. He wrote away happily at it, we should infer, at two or three several times. But the story got involved beyond the possibility of any disentanglement by ordinary laws;- the first enthusiasm was over, and the poem then, if we guess its history aright, lay perdu for years in the author's portfolio. Time passed, and he became Laureate. One and another occasional poem were at last to be published. Once more he drew out "Maud," and was really surprised to find how exquisite were some of its best passages, and wondered if he could do so well now. "Certainly they are worth publishing," we imagine him saying to himself; and so there is hurried on a clumsy postscript about the Russian war, and the whole is sent to press.

For ourselves, we are gratified with what we have; and will not complain that we have no more.

In the same volume, "The Brook" is a charming little idyl. "The Charge of the Light Brigade" makes one of the minor pieces, in the form in which posterity will know it, for posterity accepts a poet's own