to her, they speedily yielded, and all three parties were reinstated in the same territory as before the war. With this basis the peace was signed on the 15th of February. Six weeks afterwards Frederick made a public entry into his capital, which he had not seen for six years; he sat in an open carriage with Prince Ferdinand of Brunswick at his side; and the people of Berlin, thinned as they were in numbers, and well-nigh ruined in fortunes, by the long-protracted war, greeted with enthusiastic shouts the heroes of their country.* Never had any Sovereign waged so arduous a contest with more undeviating spirit or more varying success. Of ten pitched battles where he commanded in person he had been worsted in three and victorious in seven. Of six, where other chiefs directed the Prussian armies, every one, except only Prince Henry's at Freyberg, had been a defeat. According to Frederick's own computation he had lost in these terrible seven years 180,000 soldiers, while of Russians there had fallen 120,000, of Austrians 140,000, and of French 200,000. But such numbers, vast as they seem, give a most inadequate idea of all the misery, desolation, and havoc which this warfare had wrought. Pestilence had swept away many peaceful thousands; whole districts, especially in Brandenburg and Pomerania, were turned to wastes; all the best dwellings laid in ashes; the very seed-corn in part devoured, and none but women and children left to follow the plough. An officer reports that he rode through seven villages of Hesse in which he found only one single human being; a clergyman who was boiling horse-beans for his dinner. But no dangers could vanquish, no sufferings exhaust, the patriotic spirit of the Prussians. Seeing the independence of their country at stake, they scarcely even murmured or complained; they showed themselves ready in such a cause to encounter the worst perils with unshrinking courage, and endure the worst hardships with magnanimous patience. Their conduct as a people during the two appalling struggles of 1756 and

* The population of Berlin, which in 1747 was 107,224 souls, had in 1761 declined to 98,238, of whom no less than 30,000 were reduced to subsist on weekly alms. (Preuss, Lebens-Geschichte, vol. ii. p. 349.)

† Arch.nholtz, vol. ii. p. 280.

1763.

PATRIOTIC SPIRIT OF THE PRUSSIANS.

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1813 has always appeared to me deserving of the highest admiration. From other countries and other ages History can show several chiefs as great as Frederick, and many chiefs greater than Blücher. How few, on the contrary, are the nations that, like the Prussian at these two periods, have stood firm against foreign invaders with the utmost energy and the utmost moderation combined,— never relenting in their just hostility, and never venting it, like some southern races, in deeds of tumult and assassination, proud of their martial renown, yet not blindly relying upon it, and always vindicating that pride by fresh achievements and accumulated glories.

IF in some fairy tale or supernatural legend we were to read of an island, seated far in the Northern seas, so ungenial in its climate and so barren in its soil that no richer fruits than sloes or blackberries were its aboriginal growth,

-whose tribes of painted savages continued to dwell in huts of sedge, or, at best, pile together altars of rude stone, for ages after other nations widely spread over the globe had already achieved wondrous works of sculpture and design, the gorgeous rock-temples of Ellora, the storied obelisks of Thebes, or the lion-crested portals of Mycenæ ;-If it were added, that this island had afterwards by skill and industry attained the highest degree of artificial fertility, and combined in its luxury the fruits of every clime, that the sea, instead of remaining its barrier, had become almost a part of its empire,—that its inhabitants were now amongst the foremost of the earth in commerce and in freedom, in arts and in arms,

-that their indomitable energy had subdued, across fifteen thousand miles of ocean, a land ten times more extensive than their own,-that in this territory they now peacefully reigned over one hundred and twenty millions of subjects or dependents,—the race of the builders of Ellora, and the heirs of the Great Mogul; - If, further still, we were told that in this conquest the rule of all other conquests had been reversed,—that the reign of the strangers, alien in blood, in language, and in faith, had been beyond any other in that region fraught with blessings, that humanity and justice, the security of life and property, the progress of improvement and instruction, were far greater under the worst of the foreign governors than under the best of the native princes;-with what scorn might we not be tempted to fling down the lying scroll,-exclaiming that even in fiction there should be

INDIA.]

ALEXANDER'S EXPEDITION.

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some decent bounds of probability observed, that even in the Arabian Nights no such prodigies are wrought by spells or talismans, by the lamp of Aladdin or the seal of Solomon!

To the marvels of this the most remarkable event in politics since the discovery of the New World, -the subjugation of India by the English,- might be added, how seldom and how imperfectly its particulars are known to the English themselves. Men of education and knowledge amongst us will generally be found far better versed in other modern achievements of much less magnitude, and in which our countrymen had no concern. The reason is, I conceive, that the historians of British India, some of them eminent in other respects, all require from their readers for their due comprehension a preliminary stock of Eastern lore. Perhaps a stronger popular impression might attend a less learned and less copious work. Meanwhile, to trace the origin of our Eastern greatness in a slight but clear and faithful outline, however feebly performed, is at least no unworthy aim. I shall endeavour in this and the following chapter to shadow forth the first part of the career, -sometimes, it is true, marred by incapacity, and sometimes stained by injustice, but on the whole the career of genius and of valour, by which in less than fifty years a factory was changed into an empire.

The earliest authentic accounts of India and its inhabitants are derived from the expedition of Alexander. Modern critics have remarked with surprise how well the descriptions given by his officers portray what we now behold in that country at the distance of two thousand years. The delicate and slender forms of the people; their dark complexion; their black uncurled hair; their cotton raiment; their vegetable food; their training of elephants to battle; their division into separate castes; the prohibition of intermarriage from one caste to another; the name of Brachmani ̧ or Bramins to their priests; the custom of widows burning themselves on the funeral piles of their husbands; - these, and several other particulars which Arrian has recorded, apply to the modern quite as perfectly as to the ancient Hindoos.*

* Robertson's Historical Disquisition, p. 21. and 187. ed. 1791.

The progress of Alexander in India itself did not extend beyond the district of the Punjaub, and the navigation of the Indus between that district and the sea. But on Affghanistan he made a more lasting impression; a dynasty which he founded in that country is proved by its coins to have subsisted during several generations; and a monument which he raised even now remains.—When, in May 1842, a melancholy train of captives, the survivors of the greatest military disaster that England had ever yet to mourn, were slowly wending up the mountain-passes of Cabul, they beheld, towering high above them, the column of the Macedonian conqueror.*

Many ages after Alexander's expedition, the tide of Mahometan invasion, which had already overwhelmed the kingdom of Persia, approached the shores of the Indus and the Ganges. The gentle unwarlike Hindoos, with their antiquated forms of idolatry, were ill-fitted to withstand the enthusiasm of a new religion, and the energy of a fiercer race. But it is remarkable, that, widely as the disciples of the Koran spread in India, there was never, as in like cases, any amalgamation between the conquered and the conquerors, between the old faith and the new. Although the Mahometans have succeeded in converting almost every man of almost every other nation that they conquered, and although in India they formed the sovereign and controlling power in so many states and for so many years, yet they do not now exceed, and never have exceeded, one seventh of the whole Indian population.

At the period of Alexander's invasion, as during most of the Mahometan conquests, the provinces of India do not appear combined in any general system, nor ruled by any single sovereign. Alexander found there separate and it would seem independent chiefs, such as Porus,whose appellation, according to modern commentators, was not a name, but a title; - merely the Greek ending

* Compare, on Alexander's Pillar, Lady Sale's Journal (p. 354.) with Lieut. Eyre's (p. 301.). For the Greek reigns in Affghanistan I would refer the reader to the learned and important work of Professor H. H. Wilson, Ariana Antiqua, London, 1841, and to a note in the excellent History of early India by my much respected friend, Mr. Mountstuart Elphinstone (vol. i. p. 468-476.).