BOOKS.

THE THACKERAYS IN INDIA, AND SOME CALCUTTA GRAVES.*

WITHIN the modest limits of one hundred and eighty-four small octavo pages, Sir William Hunter has written a book so crowded with the action and enterprise, and the sentiment and romance, of a century of lives and deaths, that one rises from the reading of it almost crushed by the mass of its emotion and smitten with remorse for the little thought given before to all the doing and suffering for which it claims our sympathy. Wandering in the neglected graveyards of Calcutta, Sir William tells us that he found himself "in- voluntarily composing an apologia for the dead" warriors and administrators who amidst hardship and not a little obloquy laid roughly, but surely, the foundations of our Indian Empire. And this apologia, which fills about one-third of the volume, flashes before us, by a succession of magical touches, the principal episodes of the settlement of Calcutta, and gives us more insight into the characters of the men who played the great parts in the story than most of us could gain by long poring over tomes of history. Some lives, too, it lights up, whose title to be remembered derives not from the large place they occupied, but from the faithfulness, the courage, the tenderness, or the self-abnegation that covered a little part with beauty. And by some graves, not un-

tarnished by violence or greed, it asks the generous forgive- ness which Christian men who bind their Old Testament

together with the New, should be prepared to give to the sins of great men who were at least true to the standard of right and honour accepted in their day. And all this, it is very curious to think, we owe to a little mistake made by the biographical editor of the " Chandos " Milton. Sir William Hunter, having read in that book that the last descendant of the writer of Paradise Lost; died a parish clerk at Calcutta, set to work to search for his grave in the cemeteries of that city. But it seems the parish clerk really died at Madras, not Calcutta, and so— "The great magazines of mortality upon the outskirts of Cal- cutta were explored in vain. Gradually, however, in pacing up and down their thick-set avenues of tombs, the parish clerk was crowded out of my mind by the long procession of well-known Indian names : some of them ennobled by heroic deeds, some mutely protesting against unmerited obloquy, not a few tarnished by greed and crime, but all pleading the pardon that is earned by death."

A book so full and yet so short makes the despair of the reviewer. Almost every page has its episode or half-a-dozen incidents to which one would like to call attention, and hardly a page but tempts one to transcribe a passage rich with fine feeling and literary beauty. But space is even straiter in a review than in a graveyard, and we can but indicate a very few points and commend the whole warmly to the reader. Anent the graves of General °leveling and Colonel Monson, who with Philip Francis formed the Council of Three sent out by Parliament to control the administration of Warren Hastings, all the heat and passion of the great indictment of the Company's great Governor blaze up again in Sir William's pages, and a few brilliant paragraphs give us some of the principal scenes of the battle waged by Hastings against his accusers. Over the sins of men like Clive and Hastings our author's generous shield is bravely extended, but for Hastings's brilliant enemy he has no mercy to spare. His portrait of Sir Philip Francis has no vein of apology in it; but then Francis was not buried at Calcutta. His friend Lady Anne Monson was, how- ever ; and a propos of her whist-table and her scandalous tongue, we are told that "if the men of that wrathful age lied about their opponents, the ladies fibbed with a subtler venom." The tomb of Job Charnock—how many living Englishmen ever heard his name ?-.-calls forth the tale of the founding and building of Calcutta. And we learn that a slab within a recess of the same tomb commemorates the services • The Thatkeraps in India, and &IRO Calcutta Grates. By Sir William Hunter. London ; Henry Fronde. of Surgeon William Hamilton, who in 1715 cured the Great Mogul of a sickness that threatened his life, and asked and obtained as fee a grant of privileges to lib countrymen. Then there is the story of how Admiral Watson brought relief to the English when they were driven out of Calcutta, after the Black Hole business; and, like a bright star in the sweeping tale of a mighty comet, comes, in the train of this great epic, the beautiful story of an English midshipman's tender heroism :— "When they brought Admiral Watson to St. John's Church- yard, they dug his grave near to a mound newly raised over a midshipman of his own flagship. Billy' Speke was the son of Captain Henry Spoke of the Kent, which carried the Admiral's red pennant at her mizzentop-mast During the capture of the French settlement, Chandarnagar, or Fort Orleans on the Hugli as it was called, the Kent received one hundred and thirty-eight cannon-shot through her side next the fort, her decks were swept with grape, her masts and rigging hacked to pieces, and within three hours one hundred and eleven of her crew lay wounded or dead. Captain Speke and his son, a lad of sixteen years, the doctor says, were struck at the same moment. The wounded Captain, seeing his boy's leg hanging only by the skin, remarked to the Admiral, Indeed, Sir, this was a cruel shot to knock down both the father and the son." Mr. Watson's heart was too full to make the least reply,' writes the surgeon, disjointed sentences from whose narrative may complete the tale. After doing what he could for the father, Dr. Ives went to the son. But the lad would not allow him to touch the leg until the surgeon assured him 'upon my honour' that his father's wound had been dressed and promised well. Then,' replied the boy, • pray, Sir, look to and dress this poor man who is groaning so sadly beside me." I told him that he already had been taken care of. He calmly observed, " Sir, I fear you must amputate above the joint." I replied," My dear, I must." Upon which he clasped both his hands together, and lifting his eyes in the most devout and fervent manner towards heaven, he offered up the following short but earnest petition : "Good God, do Thou enable me to behave worthy of my father's son." 1 then performed the operation above the joint of the knee ; but during the whole time the intrepid youth never spake a word or uttered a groan that could be heard at a yard distance.' Throughout the long torture of the amputation, the father lay stretched close to his son. 'But whatever were his [the father's] feelings, we dis- covered no other expression of them than what the silent trickling tears declared, though the bare recollection of the scene, even at this distant time, is too painful for me.' Next morning both were taken, together with the rest of the wounded, to Calcutta, the father being lodged in a relative's house, the poor boy in the hos- pital under the doctor's own eye. After thirteen days of agony

the end came."

There are more details, not less touching than those we have quoted, about brave Billy Speke. But extracts must stop somewhere. And we are leaving ourselves hardly space to speak of the main section of the book, which tells the story of Thackeray's forbears in India. The first Thackeray who went out was William Makepeace, youngest of the sixteen children of Dr. Thomas Thackeray, who was Head-Master of Harrow from 1746 to 1760, and did his work there so well that in fourteen years he brought the school out of disorder into order, and raised its numbers from thirty - three to a hundred and thirty. Young William Makepeace Thackeray—warranted by a writing-master of Bromley-by- Bow to have "gone through a regular set of merchants' accounts and the practical rules of arithmetic," and to under- stand "what he has learnt as well as most young gentlemen of his age [16] and experience "—sailed in the 'Lord Camden,' with ten ;other young writers nominated to the Company's service, and arrived in Calcutta in June, 1766; bringing with him, as his mother's gift, a family Bible which she had already used for fifty-three years, and which, we are told, has "sur- vived the many generations of Thackerays since passed away." In the course of a year be more than justified his instructor's certificate by deserving and getting about £145 a year, while the "other young gentlemen" were not re- ceiving more than 280. And in five years he was able to make a home for two of his sisters,—Henrietta, a beauty of three and twenty, and Jane, a "kind, unaffected woman" of thirty- two, of whom the mother said, "If there's a sensible man

in India, he will find out Jane," words which were quickly verified by her marriage with Major Rennell, a man of many gifts and virtues and high distinction, whose story, however, we may not digress into.

In 1772 young Thackeray was appointed " Resident " or Collector of Sylhet, a then dangerous frontier province of North-Eastern Bengal. Though Olive's reforms threw dis- credit upon the receiving of gifts from native Princes, Indian Civil servants were still permitted to add to their official salaries by private trading, and by 1776 Thackeray bad made a sufficient fortune to allow him to marry, retire,

and come home to England at the age of twenty-six. Two of his sources of income had been the destruction of tigers and the capture of wild elephants ; and the name of " Sylhet Thackeray" is still remembered in Bengal as that of a mighty bunter. William Makepeace Thackeray's marriage brought in a new strain of no small importance in the making of the family tradition. Amelia Richmond Webb was descended from the noble "Constables of Richmond and Lords of Burton," a romantic and aristocratic lineage frankly appreciated by the author of Vanity Fair. But we cannot stop to open up this vista, or to more than name the good brother-in-law, Peter Moore, husband of one of Amelia's sisters, who became eventually the guardian of the novelist's boyhood, and is supposed to have contributed some traits of the character of Colonel Newcome. The Thackeray-Webb marriage produced twelve children, of whom nine went to India :—

"Of the seven sons of William Makepeace Thackeray three received appointments in the Company's Civil Service at Madras, a fourth in its Bengal Civil Service, and a fifth in its Bengal army. A sixth went to Calcutta as a barrister. Of four daughters who reached womanhood, two married Bengal civilians, the husband of a third was Attorney-General in Ceylon, the fourth became the mother of a distinguished member of the Viceroy's Council in India. The only son of the Sylhet elephant-hunter who did not go to the East was Francis, in holy orders. A man of learning and of sufficient means, he early retired to a Hertfordshire parish and spent his life among his books. Famous in the family for his fairy-tales 11

It is impossible for us to follow the adventures of the six Thackeray brothers in India. But Sir William Hunter reminds us that we are too apt to "think of such families as prosperous cliques who, apart from personal merit, were pitchforked into a lucrative service, and retired without effort to various degrees of opulence." So let us catch up some of them at their deaths—after all this is a book of graves—for not one of them came home, and take to heart the other side of the question as tersely put by Major Rennell : "Scarce one out of seventy men returns to his native country."

Richmond Thackeray, father of the novelist, was the second son of the elephant-hunter. He went out to India, as a writer in the Company's Civil Service, in 1798, when he was seven- teen, and did good work, first as Warden of the Marches, and afterwards as collector of the Calcutta district, where he especially shone as a road-maker. But his life was cut short at thirty-five —

"On September 13, 1815, a train of merchants, soldiers, and digni- taries defiled along that road behind the coffin of a civilian struck down midway in his career. I wonder if the chief mourner was a pale-faced little boy of four, who has come to be known in all English-speaking lands as the great-hearted satirist of our age and the prime master of our full-grown English tongue ? For it was the father of William Makepeace Thackeray whom Calcutta was escorting to his grave. The year 1815 had been a death-dealing one to the Thackerays in Bengal. It opened with the news that the younger brother of the just deceased Richmond Thackeray was fallen in a desperate fight in Nepal. On August 14, Richmond headed the funeral procession of his cousin Henry to the military burial-ground in the southern suburb of Calcutta. And now within a month, on September 13, Richmond was himself carried forth for burial."

Richmond Thackeray's marriage to Anne Becher had made an alliance with another great Indian family,—" a family noted for the tenderness of its women." When Richmond died, his widow remained with her people in India and married again, but the boy, William Makepeace Thackeray, was sent home to Hadley at six years old, and placed under the guardianship of Peter Moore. None the less, it was-

" The mother's influence that remained with him through life. Divided by half the world, the child clung to her memory ; the separation was followed by years of tender reunion, which ended only with his death. When suffering from the tyrant of a private school, 'I remember,' he wrote forty years afterwards, kneeling by my little bed at night, and saying "Pray, God, I may dream of my mother."' The public schoolboy at Charterhouse wrote almost daily to her a sort of journal. For her the gay young man at Cambridge and Weimar found leisure to compile the most delightful pictorial epistles. On her second widowhood his house became her home. His one surviving daughter bears her name. The shadow of a great domestic sorrow settled heavily on his prime he was cut off before he reached the honours of old age. But the tenderness of that beautiful mother went with him through his whole life."

And the moral of it all is that Thackeray's genius—the genius of "the manliest and the tenderest man of letters of our age "—was the "fine flower of a century of a culture" that bad passed through the veins of a vigorous ancestry of men of the world, of men of honour and ability, of soldiers, scholars,

administrators, schoolmasters, churchmen, who earned their bread with their brains and carved their fame with their swords; and of women, tender, affectionate, sensible, and good, who contributed to the rich blend their own particular gift of reverence for all the sanctities of home.