cular manner, study purity both of body and mind; be mild in speech, and patient of labour; this will secure him a more 'eminent class in another transmigration.

CHAP. X.

On the mixed Classes, and on Men's Duty in Times of public Distress.

The tenth chapter of the code is neither very long nor very important; the first part has reference to the genealogy of the tribes, and the purity of their blood. In proportion as they marry in the tribes below them, (for a Brahmin may have a wife from each tribe,) the sons bear the stamp of degradation: if he takes one from the Khettri tribe, he is degraded in the first degree; if from the Vaisya, in the second; and so on. An endless enumeration of instances of this kind follows through all the various classes; their duties are stated and their occupations fixed, since, in fact, those born of mixed blood belong to no original class, and consequently can have no appointed profession. A picturesque description of the miseries of the CHANDALAH, or outcast tribe, succeeds, I presume, in terrorem to the others. It is B b

VOL. VII.

ordained that they exist remote from their fellow-creatures amidst the filth and dirt of the suburbs; their sole wealth must consist in dogs and asses; their clothes must be the polluted mantles of the deceased; their dishes for food broken pots; their ornaments, rusty iron; their food must be given them in potsherds at a distance, that the giver may not be defiled by the shade of their outcast bodies; their business is to carry out the corpses of those who die without kindred; they are the public executioners; and the whole that they can be heir to are the clothes and other wretched property of the slain malefactor. A great many other particulars of this exiled tribe are added by other authors, which I have elsewhere enumerated and they form, themselves, no weak proof of the unrelenting spirit of the Hindoo code, that could thus doom a vast class of people, a fifth of the nation, to unpitied, perhaps unmerited, wretchedness. An Indian, in his bigotted attachment to the Metempsychosis, would fly to save the life of a noxious reptile; but, were a Chandalah falling down a precipice, he would not extend his hand to save him from perdition.

The second portion of this chapter discusses the question how, in times of great adversity or distress, the individuals of the four tribes, unable to subsist on their usual occupation, are

to obtain a maintenance. A Brahmin, it is determined, unable to live by the duties of his profession, may even take up arms and become a soldier; or he may enter into commerce, and subsist as a mercantile man; or finally, if absolutely necessary, by tillage, and attending cattle. A great many more restrictions, however, are laid upon the Brahmin, thus occupied, on account of his purer character, than on the soldier, the merchant, and herdsman, engaged in their native employ; many articles used in war and commerce being absolutely forbidden him even to touch, which are familiar to them. A Khettri, or military man, in distress, may subsist by all these means in the descending scale; but he must never aspire to the honours of the sacerdotal function. The mercantile man and the Sudra may, in the same manner, deviate from their own immediate line of life; but nothing of this kind is to be done without urgent and indispensable necessity, since it immediately breaks in upon the sublime laws of Brahma, instituted at the beginning of time, and violates the eternal order of the Indian casts.

CHAP. XI.

On Penance and Expiation.

A considerable portion of the rules and precepts laid down in this chapter is mere repetition of those inculcated in the sixth chapter, or that on DEVOTION: some are very severe, and others even ludicrous. What is new on the subject need only be noticed amidst the terrible display which it exhibits of expiatory tortures. These expiations, however, are not always by corporeal punishment; they may be compounded for by high fines paid to the gods, and their vicegerents the Brahmins. The slayer of a Brahmin undesignedly, if he be of the military tribe, must expose himself to be shot to death by archers, or cast himself headlong thrice into a blazing fire. He, who has intentionally drunk inebriating liquor, may expiate his crime by swallowing spirit on flame, or by severely burning his body. For stealing from a Brahmin, he must carry to the king, on his shoulder, an iron mace, with which the sovereign must strike him, and, whether he die or not by the blow, the crime is expiated. He, who has accidentally killed a cow, must array himself in her hide, and, thus invested, must, for three

months, incessantly attend the herd to which she belongs, and guard them from tigers by night and by day. For killing snakes and other animals, offerings are to be made to the Brahmins, proportioned to the purity and value of the animals slain. An immense catalogue of smaller offences, or rather of acts only criminal on Indian ground, are enumerated, and the expiations prescribed are, in general, long abstinence from food, swallowing the urine of a cow, prolonged suppression of the breath, sitting up to the neck in water, or some such singular punishment. For the greater offences, among other inflictions, we find mentioned the ardent penance, as it is rightly enough denominated, boiling milk or oil; hot clarified butter; hot steam, termed paraca; total fasts of dreadful length, twelve days and nights, if such fasts could ever be performed; the lunar penance, or chandrayana, in which only eight mouthfuls of undrest grain a day are allowed to be eaten, four in the morning and four at night, during a whole month. The wretched penitent, during all this time, must never suffer his wearied lids to close, nor his fainting feet to pause. As he ranges the desert forest, or stems the torrent wave, he must perpetually repeat the holy Vedas, keep all his organs in entire subjection, and ever keep his eye rivetted