'I estimate myself not according to money, but according to MY OWN personal good and amiable qualities. By the vulgar method, I should require at least 150,000 francs per annum to maintain the position which I occupy with my 6000 francs, and should still probably remain beneath it.'-p. 121.

Or, in other words, the 'personal good and amiable qualities' of Monsieur Victor Jacquemont are to those of ordinary men in the proportion of rather more than 150 to 6. This, however, must only be understood as of the relative merits of Jacquemont and an Englishman. With a Frenchman, the difference, though great, is

not so enormous:

If a thousand of my countrymen were to come into this country with double or triple what I brought, they could not probably succeed in getting into even tolerable society; by a peculiar [unique] favour I have obtained a dispensation from riches, and my relative poverty has only added to the gratification of my amour propre.'-p. 168. That is to any Englishman I stand in point of personal merit at 150 to 6,—to an ordinary Frenchman at about 2 or 3 to 1but one Frenchman in a thousand might, perhaps, be equally successful! And what places the truth of these calculations beyond all doubt is, that it is the English themselves-arrogant and selfish as, on all other occasions, they are-who assign to M. Victor Jacquemont this exalted place in the scale of human nature.

Nor, after he has left the artificial order of society, where men may be estimated by money, does he find that he is at all depreciated; he is, if we may venture to pursue his own allusion, a kind of Spanish dollar, which is current all the world over. He writes

Encamped at Moneah. I have the happiness to please every distinguished person that I have met.'

Encamped at Sinniput.- Welcomed as I everywhere am, though an entire stranger, because I always bring the most honourable recommendations, I am soon after caressed for my own sake.'

From Delhi. My letters of introduction always procure me a very flattering reception, but I should consider myself singularly unlucky indeed, if I did not find out in the evening that it is for my own sake that I am thus welcomed. My manners immediately force English stiffness to unbend, and I metamorphose into bonnes gens-that is, into Frenchmen-all the English with whom I spend even twenty-four

hours.'

This would be very flattering to our national pride, if we could entirely believe it-to be within twenty-four hours of perfection, would imply a very advanced state of civilization; and he, that in the lesson of one day can become a Frenchman, must be already very near the summit of human excellence; but our modestyawakened by the contagion of Jacquemont—is afraid to indulge

in such presumptuous hopes, particularly when we recollect that in those passages in which he evidently speaks with the greatest enthusiasm and sincerity-we mean those which dilate on his own transcendent qualities-he seldom fails to enhance them by some very injurious comparisons with the dull, unhappy English-dull and unhappy, at least, when not instructed and enlivened by his vivifying presence. But, as we before hinted, it is not the English alone who are subject to his charm.

Wade [the English resident] writes me word from Loodiana, that Runjeet Sing has written to him about me, and that of all European lords he had seen, no one pleased him so much as I have done.'vol. ii. p. 9.

And then, lest it should be supposed that this was an unauthorised report of Captain Wade's, Jacquemont prudently confirms it by his own authority

'He [Runjeet] proves it by his attention to me.'-ib.

Runjeet Sing, it is well known, writes and acts to every European he sees exactly as he did to M. Jacquemont—but all the commonplaces of oriental civility passed for honest tributes of personal admiration with this happiest of men.

Then his thoughts recur to the countless number of dear friends whom he has left scattered along the lines he has travelled, like little Poucet's pebbles in the forest- whose friendship shows itself in his absence in a thousand ingenious ways,'-but he thinks it necessary explicitly to add

I owe it all to myself. I am the real architect of my fortunes. I do not allude to the 5000 rupees which I have collected in my strong box, [he however looked, as we see, to the main chance,] but to the honourable reputation I enjoy with every one.'-vol. ii. p. 74.

His friends in France were, it seems, astonished, and somewhat incredulous, at the accounts he had given of the amiability of the English; but he apprises them that they have read his letters too hastily that he meant not to say that the English were amiable in general, but only made so by his means and under his influence. 'You say,' he writes to his father, that since the English are so amiable to me they must be very different in India from what they are at home-there may be something in that-but I take to MYSELF the greatest part of the merit of this kind of MIRACLE.'-vol. ii. p. 242.

6

How singular is my fortune with the English! They assume to me an expression of kindness, in spite of themselves as it were, and probably for the first time in their lives! Your friendship for me, my dear Zoé, would enjoy the MIRACLES I thus and without effort operate.' -vol. ii. p. 260.

When a man gets to the performance of miracles, we think it high time to submit at once to his supremacy, and we therefore here close our feeble and imperfect exhibition of M. Victor Jacque

mont's

mont's innumerable and indescribable virtues and accomplishments, as testified by the best-informed and most unprejudiced of all witnesses-M. Victor Jacquemont himself.

Is not all this very surprising ?-We talk of the march of mind and of the lights of the age-but has there appeared, since letters were invented, such an extravagant tissue of personal vanity ?The only thing that we recollect at all like it is the strange Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini; but here is a French savant, selected by his Government as a man of science and discretion— noted in his own family, even to ridicule, for excessive modesty— who makes his first appearance in the world in higher flights of extravagant egotism than the crack-brained Italian did, even after he had astonished the world by the still unrivalled productions of his art!

As to M. Jacquemont's scientific qualifications for, or success in the mission on which he was employed, we can pronounce no opinion; for, strange to say, amidst the vast mass of letters, and the great variety of topics which he introduces, there is scarcely an allusion to his scientific pursuits. We are told that his collections were large, and for aught we know they may be found to contain some very valuable articles, but we confess that we do not anticipate much addition to natural knowledge from his own scientific essays. He seems not to have been of a discriminating or analytical turn of mind, and is miserably deficient in the first elements of induction. We shall give a few specimens. Happening to have fine weather during the first two-thirds of his voyage, he frequently and decidedly expresses a total disbelief in storms-a slight gale off the Cape only confirmed that opinion:

Two days after our departure, we encountered off the Cape of Tempests and as we doubled it, the gale rendered a matter of course by poetical tradition. It drowned a few of our fowls, and that was all. You know that decidedly there are no tempests. The longer I am afloat, the more I am convinced that they are only a happy fiction of poets. The word is hardly known to seamen, and they never make use of it. The maximum of the species, speaking prosaically-that is, sticking to the truth-is a very strong wind: it breaks a mast or two, and drowns nobody. It is not terrible to look at; it is only vexigenous [engendering vexation], disagreeable, and ugly. The picturesque in it is very rare.'-vol. i. p. 61.

This letter was closed at the Isle of Bourbon, on the 3d of February, but on that very day week, this Parcus deorum cultor was destined to receive, like Horace, (but not, we are sorry to add, with so good a result,) a lesson from the angry heavens. On the 10th February began a hurricane, which was attended with

the

the most appalling appearances and the most calamitous results both ashore and afloat; the Zélée was blown out of the roads, leaving Jacquemont, and, what was worse, all her officers-except one Lieutenant and one midshipman-on shore. This event cured him of his presumption about storms; but he does not seem to have drawn from it the better and more extensive lessons with which it was pregnant. Before he has even landed in India, he had formed a decided opinion on the insalubrity of the mode of life prevalent there amongst the English :

'I am fortifying myself in a devout love of abstemiousness, which, I have no doubt, will cause me to enjoy perfect health in India, amid hepatitis, fevers, dropsies, and disorders without number, which afflict the rich English, who commit excesses at table seven hundred and twenty times a year.'-p. 77.

To this subject he frequently recurs--and repeats his censure of the perilous absurdity of the English mode of life-or we should rather say of death-for the English for the most part die,' as he tells us, from not following a regimen similar to his.'-(p. 122.) Nor is it at Calcutta only that this mortiferous system prevails; in all the remote stations, even up to the Himalayah, he regrets that his excellent and hospitable friends were-in spite of his precept and example-digging their own graves by those habits which cannot fail to produce, as this sapient oracle warned them, 'hepatitis, fever, &c.; and we cannot doubt that he would have given us a similar account of the deleterious habits at Bombay, but thatunfortunately-just as he reached that presidency, he himself died of hepatitis and fever ;' and it so happens, that, at the last account we have seen from India, all the numerous friends to whom he had predicted early death-the Bentincks, Wades, Kennedies, Halls, &c.-were-every man of them-alive to lament his loss, and what they may probably consider a not much lighter misfortune the publication of his letters. A pretty conclusive, refutation of his medical hypothesis.

It is to the same presumptuous and thoughtless style of reasoning that we attribute those violent boutades against the English character in general, which contrast so strongly with his panegyrics on every individual Englishman he encounters. He had imbibed, it seems, from the old apothecary his father-who, for aught that appears, had never been in England, nor even spoken to an Englishman-the idea that the English were 'stiff'—' proud'—'harsh'— 'unamiable'-'with little natural affection' and 'no idea whatsoever of the charms of society.' M. Victor Jacquemont comes amongst them, and finds them to his infinite surprise, in every instance, and without one single exception-hospitable-kind-amiable-affec tionate-social, and in short, the exact reverse of his preconcep

tion. How does this phenomenon strike the mind of our philoso pher? If his father, hot from a history of Siam, had told him that all the elephants in India were white, while he had found, on the contrary, that every elephant, wild or tame, which he had seen, was, without a single exception in some thousand specimens, brown, would not a reasoning naturalist have suspected that the apothecary, who had never been in India and never perhaps had seen an elephant, except one in the Jardin des Plantes, might be mistaken, and that the real colour of the animal was certainly brown? Not so Jacquemont! in spite of the evidence of his own senses, he continues to be of his original opinion; but not being able otherwise to reconcile his father's theory with his own experience, he comes to this rational and scientific conclusion, that, although it is indisputably true that all elephants are naturally white, yet it invariably and miraculously' happens, that whenever a Frenchman approaches one of these animals he instantly becomes brown ;—or, to come to Jacquemont's point-all Englishmen are naturally brutes, but under the bewitching influence of a Frenchman, they miraculously change their natures, and become the most civilized and amiable of mankind.

The following, though not quite a corollary of the former proposition, is nearly allied to it. He sneers at the multitude of native servants which every lazy Englishman requires, and he contrasts that with his own personal activity and simplicity. I shall,' he says, p. 119, have but six servants, while an English captain of infantry' [a vastly inferior animal to M. Jacquemont] would have five-and-twenty.' And again- An English ensign has a table in his tent, as well as chairs; for my part, I will eat kneeling or standing.' (p. 123.) Now mark the sequel of this boast. We turn over a few pages, and we find that, in the pride of his heart, he acquaints his father (vol. i. p. 316), that he never has less than fifty attendants, exactly double what he had before ridiculed in an English captain of infantry; and he subsequently tells us that he had chairs and a table, and not less than sixty attendants.' And here we cannot but express some little wonder at the kind of state in which this worthy appears to have travelled. His allowance from his own government was originally but 6000 francs-i. e. 240l. a-year-about the same as the pay of an English ensign in India— and he frequently complains that the subsequent additions to his income were not available to him.-How then were the expenses of his escort, and other services of that nature, defrayed? Was the Indian government at any charge for Jacquemont's journeys? We hope not. Lord William Bentinck has-as M. Jacquemont and better authority than M. Jacquemont's tell us-attempted a system of economy so strict as to occasion

great