women themselves, after the puerperal and menstrual taint; for accidental contact with a Chandalab, or outcast: many of these are appointed to be by the fire, but far more by the water, ordeal, and the duration generally from three to ten days. The third article exhibits to us a striking proof in how contemptible a light the amiable part of our species is holden by the fastidious, frozen, self-admiring Brahmin, who would bind the loveliest beauty in eternal chains, and subject the most tender affection to neglect and cruel dependance. By the Indian, in this respect abominable and unsocial, code, a woman through every stage of life must be kept in perfect vassalage; in childhood, to her father; in youth, to her husband; at his decease, to her sons and his kinsmen. The stern dogma decides that" a woman must never seek independence." Other circumstances, equally degrading to the sex, are added, by the Brahmins, we must suppose; for precepts like these can never have formed a part of the patriarchal code, since the Hebrew patriarchs well interpreted that passage in Genesis relating to the creation of woman, that by her being taken out of the side of Adam, and not from any superior or inferior part of his body, was denoted her equality with her husband.

CHAP. VI.

The sixth chapter is entirely on DEVOTION, and discusses the duties incumbent on the third and fourth orders or degrees of Brahmin candidates for final beatitude.

As we have already, in the fifth volume of this work, rather extensively detailed the history of the four ASHERAM, or degrees of Brahmin probation in this transitory world, under the distinct titles BRAHMASSARI, GERISHTH, BANPERISTH, and SANIASSI, and, as this chapter is only a confirmation of the actual existence of the painful trials described in it, little more remains for us than to mark out such striking particulars as could not then be noticed from the want of this authentic document. We have traced the young Brahmin through his years of pupillage, and have seen him pious, content, and happy in the conjugal state. Severer precepts impend over his more advanced life. When his muscles become flaccid and his hair gray, and when he beholds the "child of his child," he must check the farther ebullition of passion, and seek the seclusion of the forest. His wealth, his idols, his household utensils, he must resign to his children: clothed only in the hide of an antelope, or a vesture of woven

bark, he must retire to his hermitage in the high embowering woods, and his food must be confined to bare roots and water. He must fast more rigidly than ever; he must undeviatingly perform all the appointed sacrifices to the gods of India superior and inferior, to the constellations, and the manes of his ancestors; and greatly multiply them at the awful period of the conjunction and apposition of the moon, and at the winter and summer solstices. He must alternately expose himself to the piercing extremes of intense cold and raging heat, or, to use the dreadful words of the Institutes themselves," let him, in the bot season, sit exposed to five fires, four blazing around him with the sun above: in the rains, let him stand uncovered, without even a mantle, where the clouds pour down the heaviest showers: in the cold season, let him wear humid vesture; and increase, by decrees rising above each other in harshness, the austerity of his devotion, till he perfectly dries up his bodily frame." In this short sentence what a catalogue of varied and increasing sufferings; what an inventive genius for torture have these worldrenouncing Brahmins! But, farther, if he possess any incurable disease, let him neither aim at palliation or cure; let him bear in silence the most exquisite pains, and bless the gangrene

that, like the unsatiated vulture, preys upon his vitals. If, by these and other excruciating modes, he cannot "shuffle off" the incarcerating body, let him seek eternal glory in this world and the next by finally becoming a SANIASSI.

Bearing in one hand a water-pot, in the other a staff, his eye continually fixed on the earth, his lips closed in inviolable silence, the human organs totally subdued, and utterly insensible to whatever passes around him, he must be totally absorbed in profound reflection on the holy Vedas, on the transporting joys that animate the just in heaven, on the ineffable torments that await the disobedient in hell. If any pious compassionating Brahmin bring him such homely food as a Saniassi is allowed, in the shade and obscurity of the night he may eat it; or if he fill his pot with the water of the pure rivulet, in the same nocturnal season he may drink it; but he must himself make no exertion, nor feel any solicitude for existence upon this contaminated orb. Happily, for these infatuated devotees, there are always enough of the younger students of the holy tribe to attend them in their retirement: who think that, by ministering to their necessities, they catch a part of their sanctity, and are entitled to a portion of their sublime rewards; for, by long

long continuing these excruciating severities, many of the former are by degrees plunged into a state of stupid insensibility, and become perfect ideots; and the faculties of all are impaired almost to derangement. The corporeal organs, grown callous to every external impression, are divested of all their functions, and the Saniassi appears, to weak-sighted mortals, as an immoveable statue of wood or stone; but the entranced soul is in the highest heaven with the Eternal Mind from which it emaned, and waits only for the total destruction of its unworthy comrade to obtain complete and unbounded absorption in the Deity.

Near the conclusion of this chapter occurs the following whimsical, but striking, description of the house of clay tenanted by frail mortals.

"A mansion with bones for its rafters and beams; with nerves and tendons for cords; with muscles and blood for mortar; with skin for its outward covering; filled with no perfume, but loaded with faces and u-e.

"A mansion infested by age and by sorrow, the seat of malady, harassed with pains, haunted with the quality of darkness, and incapable of standing long; such a mansion of the vital soul let its occupier always cheerfully quit." Apparently replete with magnanimity and