CURRENT LITERATURE.
early days in British India, the days when we were yet strangers in the land, or slowly making our way to that power which now overshadows the whole. The modern historian has to see behind the scenes, and besides telling the story of sieges and battles, to describe the life of the men who fought ; how the Honourable Company did a brisk business in slave-dealing towards the end of the seventeenth century, while the commodity was cheap ; and how, when it was found to be "of little advantage to the Right Honourable Company," there being also "great complaints and troubles from the country Government, for the loss of their children and servants stolen from thorn," they strictly forbade it; how the Rev. Patrick Warner was scandalised at the manners of his flock, especially at the mixed marriages between Papists and Protestants (one would have thought, from what he says, that ho would have been glad to see any marriages at all); these and suchlike things make reading that is mostly interesting, and some- times entertaining. We notice among other matters an account, fuller than any that we have seen before, of the horrors of the Black Hole. It was written by Mr. Holwell, and is in the form of a letter. He acquits, we see, the Nawab of any intention to commit the barbarity. "What followed was the result of revenge and resentment in the lower jemadars, to whose custody we were delivered, for the number of their order killed during the siege."
Previous page
