one of whose principal objects was the protection of commerce from piracy in the narrow seas. He entertained communications with nearly all the contemporary sovereigns of Europe, and in many cases the object of these alliances was the benefit of his English merchants. In spite of his political measures, Edward was a popular king: he was handsome, active, inured to manly exercises,—all qualities which win the admiration of the multitude: if he was hasty and passionate, he was generous and liberal, and when his deeper plans of policy were not concerned, showed himself placable and forgiving. His people heard with delight that the king could play at blindman's-buff like a child, with his children, and that at Christmas time no one in the hall was fuller of merry gamesomeness than the victor of Evesham and Falkirk. Above all, they honoured in him a virtue which had been but too rare among his predecessors-conjugal fidelity. Not a breath of slander taints the fair fame of Edward the First, or casts a doubt upon the genuineness of the love which he bore to his heroic queen, Eleanor of Castile, and which, after her death, he manifested in so beautiful a manner; nor had her successor, Margaret of France, any more reason to complain of her husband's conduct.

The short and wretched reign of Edward the Second is treated by Dr. Pauli with great detail, and obvious predilection. It deserved to be so, inasmuch as its events have been enveloped in a cloud of mystery which it is the delight of the genuine historian to dispel. But our author's view is most intently fixed upon the political and social movement of the nation, and the gradual establishment of our public law, and exclusive national character. Not that he neglects the stirring events which crowd upon us into a startling phantasmagoria at the commencement of the fourteenth century. Bruce and Bannockburn, Thomas of Lancaster and Andrew de Harclay, Gaveston and Despenser, Mortimer and the 'Shewolf of France,' all pass duly in review before us: nor do we miss the tyrannies of Philip le Bel, the

aggressions and the punishment of Boniface the Eighth, and the judicial murder of the Knights of the Temple. By the way, we may mention here that Dr. Pauli is fully satisfied that the charges brought against the Order were monstrous inventions, that the pretended confessions were the mere result of tortures too dreadful to be endured, and that the whole proceeding on the part of Pope Clement the Fifth and Philip of France, was one of the most abominable crimes recorded in history. We can only rejoice that the trial of these injured men was, for the most part, conducted with more regard to justice in England than elsewhere, and that it had not a bloody termination. At the same time we add the damning fact-one would think sufficient in itself to characterize the whole transactionthat in this case, for the first time, torture was applied in England to judicial proceedings. The personal character of Edward the Second comes out, upon the whole, more favourably in this narrative than we have been accustomed to consider it. His faults appear mostly to have been the result of weakness -no doubt a terrible vice in a king -rather than a bad disposition. He possessed many of the virtues of his race, was liberal, magnificent, and, when occasion required it, by no means devoid of personal courage. But instead of ruling, he suffered himself to be ruled by his favourites, and after many alternations of success and defeat, paid at last the frightful penalty of being deficient in moral strength and steadiness of purpose. It is remarkable enough that he should have more than once been completely victorious over the opposition of the greatest of his barons, and that he should have been able to send even such a prince as Thomas of Lancaster and Derby to the scaffold. But, fortunately for England, he was incapable of improving the vantage he had gained, and in spite of his successes, the power of the Crown was not reestablished, as it might have been by a bolder and wiser prince, upon a broader basis than that which even his great ancestor, Henry the Second, had laid.

We refer the reader to the

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author's work for the reigns of Edward the Third and Richard the Second, with which his history for the present closes. They abound in interesting details, and are amongst the most attractive portions of his labours. One personage indeed comes here before us in a less favourable light than many readers might anticipate. We are wont to look upon the Black Prince as a model of courtesy and bravery, as a chevalier sans peur et sans reproche, and to lament that an early death deprived his country of a ruler who would have been its glory. Dr. Pauli does full justice to his courage, his military skill, and all his other great qualities; but the account of his government in the countries which formed his appanage goes far to dissipate these pleasing illusions, and to make us rather grateful that he never had the opportunity of putting into practice in England, the principles which he followed in his Continental possessions.

We should do Dr. Pauli wrong if we led our readers to imagine that he does not enter with particular zest upon the description of all characteristic features of the different periods he describes. On the contrary, he delights in setting off to advantage the personages of his narrative; he neglects no anecdote that may give an insight into their manner of life or disposition; he depicts them in their corporeal peculiarities, and places, as far as he can, their portraits before us. But the higher philosophical tendency of his work is that which gives it its great value. Picturesque it is, for a description of those times, if executed with any moderate degree of success, could hardly be otherwise; and we have rarely read a history which, in spite of its great extent, was so full of interest and amusement. not however on these qualities, praiseworthy as they are, that we are inclined to rest our favourable judgment of the work. In our eyes the most important portions of it are those which are devoted to the development of the national life, as shown in the progressive phases of political and social institutions. It is here that the author's profound and conscientious study of his autho

It is

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rities becomes fully revealed to us, and that we admire the calm and impartial judgment which he forms upon a mass of the most heterogeneous details. Constitution, law, foreign and domestic politics, art, religion, commerce, language, manners and customs, all pass in review before him; and from all combined he draws his complete picture of the period with which he has to deal. As his work draws on, and we approach times of greater cultivation, the task becomes more varied, but more difficult also, yet our author attacks it with undiminished vigour, nay, with increased delight; there is no chapter in the whole work so excellent as the last, entitled 'The Progress in the Fourteenth Century.'

And indeed it was right and fitting that such a summary should be made at that period, for, unless we greatly err, it was the commencement of a new era, the close of an older one; the deposition of Richard the Second, (A.D. 1399,) marks not only the turning-point of English history, but a change which was growing up throughout Europe, and characterized by a new development of spiritual and material powers, that were, before the close of another century, to shatter all the foundations of the social state which had been heretofore. The English language, wielded by Wickliffe and a host of ardent reformers, was forming itself into a state in which it was to become the speech of the whole land, and Chaucer could already sing in imperishable verse to classes heretofore wedded to the productions of a foreign tongue. The great commercial and political alliances of Edward the Third had given an enormous impulse to English industry, and drawn close the bonds between this country and the laborious and wealthy Flemings. The Houses of Parliament had conquered a position in the State which they were never again entirely to lose. The forms of judicial process were becoming settled, the law of treason regulated. Fearful struggles no doubt were still to be passed through; the transitory conquest of France was to put an end for ever to the attempt to carry England out of herself. The Wars of the Roses, whose seed was sown

in the deposition of Richard of Bordeaux, were still to come, fated to annihilate an aristocracy which would have prevented the develop ment of the monarchical power, and the progress of the popular liberties. Finally, the struggles of Huss and the triumph of Luther all lay in wait in the great European movement which now began, until the fulness of time should come.

Dr. Pauli, we observe, reserves to himself the right of translation. He is himself an excellent English scholar; let us hope, therefore, that he will hasten to put his work into a dress in which it will be widely accessible to our countrymen, and thus enrich our literature with the best History of England of this period yet extant. J. M. K.

IT

THE NIGHT MAIL

we

was seven o'clock on the night of the 10th December, 1855, that we found ourselves, fresh from England, in one of the large barrack-like rooms of a Calcutta hotel, thinking partly of the coming Christmas-tide and the home which we had left behind; partly of our Indian prospects and the journey which lay before us to the far north-west. Although it was December, we sat with all the windows open, oppressed by heat and mosquitoes; and we contrasted, as so many had done before, India with England. This room, thought, looking at four staring white walls, one brown square table, and three wooden arm-chairs-voilà tout, this room is not so comfortable as the coffee-room at the club; we had rather be hearing the occasional rumble of a cab outside that window, or even those mendacious rascals who hawk the evening papers, than the dismal buzzing of mosquitoes and other insects, varied only by the occasional discordant grunting of some palki-bearers jogging on under the burden of a shilling fare. Well, never mindso we philosophically concludedeven India improves. It is a bore having to travel twelve hundred miles; but to-night, at least, we shall not be boxed up in a palki. It is, after all, something like civilization to be leaving Calcutta by the mailtrain. These reflections naturally induced us to look at the watch; it was eight o'clock; the train started at nine; and Indian habits still prevail to such an extent, notwithstanding railways, that we required not less than an hour to go from the hotel to the station, though not two miles distant. So we paid our bill, sent for the best substitute procur

TRAIN IN INDIA.

able for a cab-viz., a palki gharee; that is to say, a palanquin on four wheels, drawn by a horse-and started at a sober trot for the Howrah terminus. Now then, coachman, why do you stop? Ah! he has cause; we have reached the river side, and we must bid adieu to the poor substitute for a cab, and take a boat. Ah, how quickly are we transported back to Asia! England dies away in the far, far West, and Western civilization with it. It cannot be that rails are laid, and engines are steaming, and bookingclerks are stamping tickets, within a mile of us; we say, it cannot be. Look at this Eastern scene. Through the clear, cool, but not chilly atmosphere, we look into the brilliant, cloudless, starlit sky; the growing moon, already sloping to the west, strikes right up the silvered waters of the Hooghly, splinters the wake of our boat, and casts deep shadows under the lee of the black ships which lie everywhere quiet, graceful, motionless, and, like all anchored ships at night, phantom-like; the natives going on their ordinary course wind noiselessly hither and thither, while the natives plying for hire at the strand fill the air with their discordant cries; Eastern are the sounds-Eastern is the skyEastern is the slowly moving sacred river; it cannot be that on yonder bank, where nothing is seen as yet but a few Eastern palm-trees, we shall find a night mail-train!

But the boat approaches the northern shore of the Hooghly. The cries which we had left on the other bank revive again; amidst screams, entreaties, and most admired disorder, which two or three half-caste policemen are powerless

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to repress, we land, and have no more need to ask, Where is the railway? There, right before us, is the unmistakeable shed. Unmistakeable, indeed! Let architects dispute about their Grecian and their Gothic, their old English and Byzantine, their Tudoresque and their anythingesque, we will undertake to pronounce at once upon that style which may be characterized as the early İron.' That pent, long, narrow roof-those girders, those pillars-there can be nothing but a railway there. Quietly and slowly, with none of the dash of a Hansom galloping up just in time to save the train, but on foot, with four hired porters-that is to say, poor half-naked Coolies-carrying our baggage, we approach the booking-office. This office is a strange combination of England and India. Indian is the large, high, spacious, verandahed room; Indian are the open doors and the green venetians; Indian is that native clerk in a white cotton jacket;-but English is the wooden screen perforated by ticket windows, that bars the office from the outer world; English is the application we now make, One firstclass to Raneegunge;' English the art with which the oblong cardticket is thrust into the stamping machine; English the like heavy fare, equivalent to twenty-three shillings, which is demanded for our one hundred and twenty miles' journey.

We passed on to the deserted platform, feebly illuminated by some weak oil lamps-for Calcutta has its railway, but not its gas-lights. There stood the unpainted wooden carriages; one first-class quite empty, two second-class scantily occupied by a mixed population of Europeans, half-castes, and natives, and six or seven third-class, in which the great multitude, on whom the fortune of the Calcutta Railway depends-the great multitude for whose accommodation, as distinguished from the great few, all the secrets of nature are gradually brought to lightwere herded together in a manner more profitable to the Company than pleasant to the passenger.

The train was being made up into two parts, as our readers may recollect that the trains at Euston-square are made up. Where is the engine ?'

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He

we asked of the guard, a young Englishman, who, with his neat uniform and despatch-box, looked fresh transplanted from one of the home lines. It's with the fore part of the train, sir,' he answered; 'we shall shove down to it.' We observed, as we have just remarked above, that this was like Eustonsquare. The poor man's eyes lighted up directly. That remark opened a fellow-feeling between us. We had both looked into railway minutia with curious, interested eyes; so, we were soon in conversation. had been on the York, Newcastle, and Berwick line in the days of its independence. Ah! we agreed; the express trains did go on that line! He enjoyed the conversation, we trust; certainly we did. For a few minutes the iron roads, the rich plains of Yorkshire, the coal-seamed, furnace-lighted tracts of Durham were vividly before us; when he was called off to his duty, to see native porters put up some luggage, or rather to scold and push and intimidate them (we will not use any stronger expression, lest he should lose his place), till five men consented, with much groaning, shouting, and quarrelling, to place on the roof of a carriage one box such as an English porter would have tossed up with one hand. Five minutes to nine! Trains are punctual in India, if nothing else is. We talk of education. What education like that of the glorious, much abused, and as yet little understood invention of the railway? We preach all science and all virtue, but Blackey will not believe. We introduce clocks, and insist on the importance of time, but Blackey lingers for his quarter or half hour of dearly loved dawdling, nevertheless. But the railway comes; and with an awful mechanical punctuality-more stern, more silent, more exacting, more unscrupulous than any punctuality which a man can pretend to,-the clock strikes, the bell rings, the dead-alive engine whistles-moves-departs; the inexorable metal trio succeed in teaching the lesson which flesh and blood could not impress, and Blackey is never late at a railway station.

Meanwhile the Honourable Company's mail has been placed in a parcel van, under the charge of a native guard, and the night mail

train departs. It is characteristic of the railway, and its tendency to reduce all men and countries to a uniform civilization, that it admits of so little variety, either from climate, country, or any other cause. Every nation has its own peculiar vehicle; every sea, every river, has its own peculiar boat; but a train is a train all the world over. That brief whistle, that strong, silent pull, that gradual glide, that monotonous rattle, have nothing in them, here in the plains of Bengal, to distinguish them from the same sounds and sensations so often experienced amid the factories of Lancashire, the red cliffs and blue, sounding waves of South Devon, the vinebearing plains of France, the rugged passes of Styria, the tropical hills of Havannah, or the wild jungle of Western America. The train travels at a rate varying from fifteen to twenty miles an hour. About every eight miles occurs a station with some uncouth name. We look out

as we pass one of these; the long, straight line of iron rail still retains its familiar look of civilization, but all its circumstances have become entirely Oriental. The station is a little white bungalow, with green open doors; its name, Hooghly,' is written in those three characters which suggest at every turn to the most careless traveller the strange fate of India: the English, plain, business-like capital letters looking as if they were conscious of belonging to the conquering people; the graceful Persian curling from right to left, emblematic of the politeness, the facile dexterity, perhaps too of the intrigue and instability, of Central Asiatics, powerful enough to impress on a susceptible people a manner which makes every peasant of Hindostan more or less a gentleman, but unable to cope with the plain, honest force which is represented by the Roman capitals; and, lastly, the mystical Bengalee, the vernacular of the province, closely allied to every vernacular tongue all over India, which here, at the Hooghly station, is read by thousands; while of the two conquering languages one is read by hundreds, the other by units; the language of the conquered million, yet containing in it the roots of more than half the words spoken by conquer

ing English, close akin to the ancient Sanskrit, that source beyond which the stream of human language has not yet been traced.

But the train moves on, and, so far as it is concerned, the conquering English has it all its own way. The ancient Sanskrit is still represented by every one of the dull objects which meet the traveller's eye. The ungraceful palm, so strangely associated in European minds with Oriental beauty; the green, melancholy plain; the occasional glimpses of the yellow, sluggish, corpse-bearing river,-these are the witnesses to the fact-so strange, yet so forgotten-that where the English steam-engine now travels, there, just one century ago, the Nawab of Bengal was marching down on Calcutta to perpetrate the Black Hole massacrethat tragedy from which the AngloIndian Empire took its birth. Here, centuries ago, the Hindoo walked and sat and smoked, worshipping his god Permanence, even as he walks and sits and smokes and worships the same god to-day.

It is past midnight when we reach Burdwan. This is more than fifty miles from Calcutta, and is the meeting-place for the trains from the north-west and the south-east. We are sorry that we cannot, without misleading the English reader, use the familiar terms up' and 'down.' The East Indian Railway Company have thought it necessary

to

reverse the existing English usage, and have preferred a phraseology in accordance with geographical fact and Old Indian association, to the settled technicalities of the rail. The train which leaves Calcutta is called the 'up,' because it proceeds up the Gangetic valley, or more probably because, in the language of Anglo-Indians, it goes up country;' whereas the traveller fresh from England is scandalized to find that, when approaching the metropolis of India, he is nevertheless in the down-train. The geographical argument does not merit consideration. The Great Western express runs up the valley of the Thames in going from Reading to London, but Mr. Brunel's hair would stand on end were it to be called a down-train. And even their favourite expression, 'up country,'