of his work. Dr. Duff, who was attracted to his operations, as he was to everything tending to the elevation of any class of the natives of India, and who had given an account of his doings in a series of most interesting and elaborate articles in the Calcutta Review, concluded his chronicle in these glowing terms:-"It now affords us no ordinary satisfaction to be enabled authoritatively to report that, after a twelve months' investigation of the most searching character, conducted throughout on the part of the Commissioner with consummate ability, and the drawing up of reports on each of the alleged charges, extending in the aggregate to about 2,500 folio pages, the deliberate verdict of the Supreme Government has been, not merely one of bare acquittal, but, in most cases, of TRIUMPHANT VINDICATION.” And to this he appends the following note:-"The vindication would have been still more complete, had the Commissioner been enabled to extend his inquiries, not merely to those matters which bore more immediately on the calumnious charges, but also to the whole character and working of the Agent's policy. By this limitation of the inquiry, nothing like full or proper justice has yet been done to Captain Macpherson. To render it even now is, we venture to say, a duty which the Supreme Government owes to itself, not less than to the character of a greatly injured public officer. But if unhappily withheld by the Government now, the day is assuredly coming, when, on the whole facts of the case being made public, the Agent will have his full reward in the approval and sympathy of the world at large."

To this end we hope this present paper may contribute in some small degree. It was of Khond* Macpherson that we proposed to give an account, therefore we shall not follow him through his subsequent career, which was one of high distinction and great importance. We shall only state that on his return to India in 1853, Lord Dalhousie did not forget his promise, but appointed him at once to the office of Governor-General's Agent at Benares, and a few weeks afterwards to that of Political Agent at Bhopal, an appointment in which, if our recollection serves us aright, he succeeded Major Durand, with whom, as we have already stated, he shared the double honour of having been condemned by Sir Herbert Maddock, and justified by Lord Dalhousie. From this he was transferred next year to the more important post of Political Agent at Gwalior, and there, at the fearful crisis of 1857-8, he was one of the pillars on which the British Empire in India rested, and is entitled to share not unequally the

* Even in this capacity we have confined ourselves to one department of his work. His efforts for the suppression of female infanticide were not less important than those for the abolition of human sacrifice; in some respects more so, for the number of female infants annually murdered was probably three times as great as that of Meriahs annually sacrificed. But then this field was not so distinctively his own,

honour, as he shared equally the responsibility, which one Lawrence achieved at Lahore, and another, with death, at Lucknow, and Colvin at Agra. Had one of these pillars been insufficient, the whole fabric, as far as man can see, must have fallen in irretrievable ruin. "I had a personal knowledge," says one well qualified to judge (Mr. Harrington, member of the Governor-General's Council), "of the admirable tact and judgment which he displayed in dealing with Scindia, and in keeping the Gwalior Contingent, with its powerful artillery, inactive in its cantonments until after the fall of Delhi. We owe Macpherson much, much more than has been supposed, and very much more than has been acknowledged." After the suppression of the mutiny, he was actively engaged in the settlement of the country, and was intending to return home shortly to enjoy the rest that he had so nobly earned. But it was not to be. On the 15th April, 1860, he rested from his labours indeed, but it was in the rest of the grave.

Mr. Macpherson has raised a noble monument to his brother's memory in these "Memorials." He has executed his task admirably; and by a judicious blending of private letters with official documents, and with his own narrative, he has shown at once the loving heart and the graceful accomplishments of the man, and the indomitable. energy, high principle, and noble enthusiasm of the philanthropic official. But he has done more than the pious act of doing justice to a brother's memory. He has depicted a character and a career of exceeding interest, and has taught in the most impressive manner, a lesson which is worth learning by us all, that it depends on the man who holds it whether an employment shall be a dull and wearisome drudgery, or a means of blessing and benefiting his fellow-men.

THOMAS SMITH.

او

MR. ANTHONY TROLLOPE AND THE ENGLISH
CLERGY.

S it possible to write smartly on a matter of which one is almost entirely ignorant? to say things which shall tickle the public car, and serve for descriptions of persons and conditions of life, without more than the most hearsay and superficial acquaintance with facts? It would seem so, by this book of Mr. Trollope's. For his knowledge of those whom he professes to describe very rarely touches at all the present existing state of things, being almost entirely formed upon certain conventional ideas current in the novel-writing and journalizing mind. And when a touch true to nature occurs, it is almost always made to do the work of misleading, from the writer's ignorance how to lay it on, and where in the picture to place it. Accidental circumstances are generalized into normal conditions: transient arrangements are represented as final: individual and exceptional peculiarities are paraded as the characteristics of classes of men.

The ignorance of Church matters displayed in our public journals might be ground of astonishment, did we not know how much easier and more profitable it is to produce an effect, than to minister to truth. If a writer in the Times wishes to turn some Church question into ridicule, or to raise a laugh at the expense of Convocation, he can attain his object far better without than with the labour of acquainting himself with the facts. His article may abound with blunders of which any English gentleman would be ashamed; but those, even if

detected by his readers, are forgiven and forgotten, if the language in which they are conveyed is flippant enough, and the argument which they subserve, damaging enough to those against whom it is directed. A few bitter and easily remembered words, an apt quotation, an incident ludicrously applied, will make converts of the great reading multitude, though the pretended facts of the case, and the inferences from them, are alike chimerical.

Mr. Trollope's characterizations of the clergy appeared in an evening paper which, though not long started, has acquired a place in the first rank of our daily journals. We venture to hope, and we believe, that its success has been owing to merits more solid than those displayed in these very trumpery essays. Since their publication indeed, symptoms of the same "proclivities" have not been wanting but we are happy to say that the general tone of the writers in the Pall Mall Gazette is of quite another kind. Indeed, if any journal were to write on secular subjects as Mr. Trollope has here written on clerical, its days would be numbered.

*

We proceed to justify our estimate of these essays. General charges may be met with general denials. But they may be none the less deserved. We begin then by charging this writer with a total want of appreciation of the subject on which he writes. He has laid hold of certain commonplaces about the work of the clergy, and these he brings up on every occasion: but of the realities of that work he has not the slightest conception. Whether it be bishop, dean, archdeacon, or parson of the parish, Mr. Trollope's description of the man and his work deals only with those points which, in his strange use of the word, are "picturesque:" meaning, it would appear, by this term, quaint, or irregular, or ill-adapted for use, or needing adjustment. We are perhaps prepared to expect this, by the very curious sentences here and there occurring, which throw light upon Mr. Trollope's ideas respecting worship, and such spiritual matters. "When cathedral services were kept up for the honour of God rather than for the welfare of the worshippers" (p. 31) is a strange designation of times anterior to our own. We thought that the true measure of the former of these objects was the extent to which the latter has been attained. Perhaps it may be said, that we are mistaking Mr. Trollope's aim in the expression "the welfare of the worshippers." here is his own explanation of it (p. 32): "We use our cathedrals in these days as big churches, in which multitudes may worship, so that if possible they may learn to lead Christian lives." And let not this criticism seem to be a mere cavil. It is in fact an indication of the fundamental error which runs through Mr. Trollope's book.

But

Thus he says of the congé d'elire, and the manner of carrying it out, "How English, how absurd, how picturesque it all is! and, one may add, how traditionally useful!"—(P. 41).

What he believes, of course it is not for us to say; but if he believed that God and His honour and His service were on one side of an antagonism, and the interests of society and our people on the other side, we do not see that his book would need any correction.

Another general fault, a less one indeed, but not less indicative of unfitness for describing the English clergy as they are, is, the thoroughly low estimate of men and their motives shown throughout the whole of these essays. That men should be capable of high motives, and acting from generous self-devotion, entirely surpasses Mr. Trollope's conception. Every one, in every place, seems to him to be scrambling for what he can get. If a clergyman have a large income, if his place seem to Mr. Trollope to be an easy one, he forthwith becomes "sleek :" "look at a dean, and you will see that he is always sleeker' than a bishop" (p. 34): when a town incumbent has "preached himself into a fortune and a reputation," he "becomes very sleek and very famous" (p. 75). And this sort of hair-dresser's estimate of mankind is carried throughout the book. It is the snobbishness of it which we are now challenging, rather than its want of truth; though we might well ground our sentence on that also. Can any man say that our two metropolitan deans are sleeker than our metropolitan bishop? Have not all three the furrowed and worn faces of thinking and working men? Other cities occur to us, where also the dictum of Mr. Trollope would signally fail; indeed we are not sure that there are more than two or three, where the comparison would weigh the balance his way. Then as to successful town preachers, it certainly has not been a part of our experience in society, that that most laborious employment, with its anxieties burdening every week, and its "contentio laterum" and "clergyman's throat," was peculiarly fattening.

Let any one accustomed to things themselves rather than to low caricatures of them, estimate the following:

"A poor archdeacon, an archdeacon who did not keep a curate or two, an archdeacon who could not give a dinner and put a special bottle of wine upon the table, an archdeacon who did not keep a carriage, or at least a onehorse chaise, an archdeacon without a man servant, or a banker's account, would be nowhere,-if I may so speak,-in an English diocese. Such a one could not hold up his head among churchwardens, or inquire as to church repairs with any touch of proper authority. Therefore, though the archdeacon is not paid for his services as archdeacon, he is generally a gentleman who is well to do in the world, and who can take a comfortable place in the county society among which it is his happy lot to live."-(P. 44.)

And this:

"Open moral misconduct in a clergyman's life is supposed to be matter of justifiable public scandal-the scandal arising with the clerical sinner, and not with those who tell of the sin-and, as such, is, by the constitution