in the public streets, and have the way left clear for them. The subject must give way to the magistrate, the pupil to the preceptor, and all to the Brahmin, under various penalties and fines. P. 302.

The Gentoo code, after enumerating an end_ less variety of local injunctions, principally respecting personal duties and purifications, provincial commerce, morals, obedience to superiors, and the regulation of domestic concerns, concludes with a sentence remarkable. for the wise, but severe, spirit of equity that distinguishes it, allotting punishments and fines adapted to the degrees of knowledge and improvement supposed to be attained by each, and therefore rendering their offences proportionably heinous or mitigated. It is on the subject of theft, a subject which so constantly occurs, that we are unavoidably led to conjecture that the great mass of the Hindoos are less strictly honest in their dealings than they are, by some travellers, represented. If a Sooder, one of the lowest of the four classes, commits a robbery, he shall pay eight times as much as he stole; if a Bice, he shall pay sixteen times as much; if a Khettri, he shall pay a fine of thirty-two times as much; if he be a common Brahmin he shall pay sixty-four times as much; if he be a Brahmin of extensive knowledge, he

shall pay one hundred times as much; if he be e Brahmin of the highest class, he shall be fined one hundred and twenty times as much. Final page. If the same liberal cast of sentiment ran through every page, what a sublime and glorious system of jurisprudence would this code have presented to Europe?

THE LAWS OF MENU,

SON OF BRHAMA.

CHAP. I.

This initial chapter properly begins with an account of the creation of the world, and a general survey of the objects contained in it.

Menu is represented, in the first verse, as sitting reclined and wrapped in that divine absorption which, it has been often observed, is a leading tenet in the religion of India. The holy sages approach him with profound reverence; and, inquiring concerning the laws proper to be observed by the four orders, (a proof that the Indian empire was then formed, and this division of the nation then existing,) he unfolds to them the principles of all things and the manner and progress of creating them. It is here observable that water (not light, as

in the Mosaic narration) is first produced; produced, not by a mandate, but by a thought, of the Creator. In that water is placed a productive seed which becomes an egg of gold (the sphere) blazing with a thousand beams. By the same thought, he caused that egg to divide itself in two parts, and, from these two divisions, he framed the heaven above and the earth beneath.

The visible world being thus formed, the immaterial mind is produced, an emanation from the Supreme Soul; and consciousness, or rather conscience, the internal monitor. The creative spirit then proceeded to form the inferior deities and a number of genii exquisitely delicate. It is sublimely added, "He gave being to time, and the divisions of time; to the stars also and the planets." He then produced the four great tribes, or casts of India; the first from his mouth, the second from his arm, the third from his thigh, and the fourth from his foot. It is asserted that the Hindoos understand these expressions in a literal sense; but it is impossible for a dispassionate European reader to consider them in any other than an allegorical point of view. By the mouth, therefore, Menu must be understood to have meant wisdom; by the arms, strength; by the thigh, commerce; by the foot, agricultural labour and

obedience and the principle inculcated, I conceive, is, that wisdom or piety, (for, both may be fairly shadowed out by the mouth, whence the dictates of the one and the prayers of the other proceed,) strength or fortitude, external commerce, and domestic industry, form the four pillars of a great empire. Hence the four-fold politic division of the Indian nation into casts and professional characters, intended eternally to inculcate, on legislators and princes, that important axiom.

Immediately after, succeeds a detailed account of created objects animal and vegetable, from the elephant to the gnat, from the lord of the forest to the creeper; and, what is singularly remarkable, all these are declared to have internal consciousness, all to be sensible of pleasure and pain, all in a state of transmigration in a world ever tending to decay.

The divisions of Hindoo time, divine and human, from the twinkling of an eye to the day of Brahma, or a thousand great ages, are next enumerated, and the four yugs are affirmed to be the allotted period of probation for the human race, or, rather, for countless races of human beings, "breaking like bubbles on the stream of life." Among these, the Brahmin, eldest-born of the gods, who loads their altars with incense, who feeds them with clarified VOL. VII.

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butter, and whose, in fact, is the wealth of the whole world, ever keeps his elevated rank. To maintain him in holy and voluptuous indolence, the Kattry, or rajah, exposes his life in the front of battle; the merchant covers the ocean with his ships; the toiling husbandman inces→ santly tills the burning soil of India. We cannot doubt, after this, which of the Indian casts compiled this volume from the remembered Institutes of Menu.

CHA P. II.

The second chapter is entirely devoted to the important concern of, the education of the young Brahmin, and the consideration of the duties incumbent on the sacerdotal class, or first order..

Near the commencement it is declared that the great body of the ecclesiastical and civil laws of India is derived from two original sources, the SRUTI, or what was heard from above, meaning revelation; and the SMRITI, or what was remembered from the beginning, meaning immemorial usage. The man is declared anathematized who treats with contempt those two fountains of all genuine jurispru→ dence; for, in truth, were those dogmas to be