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tians, or Mahomedans; there was not one to whom he did not speak kindly, or pay some compliment on their entrance; and he walked round the assembly repeatedly to see that all were properly accommodated.' The entertainment consisted of men dancers, whom by their dresses our fair author took for women, till undeceived by the assurance of their gestures.' Next were some Cashmerian singers, with pleasing voices, accompanied by an old man, with a long white beard, and fair skin, on a sweet-toned guittar, which he touched with skill and taste to some of the odes of Hafiz, and some Hindostanee songs.' Next followed a kind of pantomime, in which men personated elephants, bears and monkeys.' Then some women danced; but Miss Graham was rather disappointed with their performance, after hearing so much of the nautch-girls of India. One of them, while dancing in a circle, twisted a piece of striped muslin into flowers, keeping each stripe for a different coloured flower.' The last amusement was the exhibition of an expert ventriloquist..

Miss Graham appears to have been indefatigable in her endeavours to see all that was to be seen. She goes to the botanical garden and talks learnedly of plants, and of insects; she visits the menagerie at Barrackpore, and talks of curious birds, ferocious bears, and royal tigers; she sees Serampore across the river, speaks of its missionaries, and their labours, and explains Mr. Marshman's dissertation on the Chinese language, which, it seems, he has taught his children to speak and write correctly' at a very early age. The poor stupid Chinese employ the greater part of their life in learning to speak and write it correctly.' Nay, such is our author's activity, that she actually mounts one of the governor-general's elephants, and sees the Barrackpore hounds throw off in chace of a jackall.'

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In the early part of the year 1811 Miss Graham returns to Madras, in her way home; and with the same laudable spirit of acquiring information, visits the ancient city of Mahaballipooram, known to scamen by the name of the Seven Pagodas, because tradition says that, in addition to two ruined temples still existing, a large city and five magnificent pagodas were there swallowed up by the sea. Coins, beads, bracelets, and a variety of articles of this sort have been dug up on the beach; and plates of copper, inscribed with grants of land for the support of the temples, bearing date above a thousand years ago, refer to the sculptured rocks of Mahvellipoor, as being then so ancient that history gave no account of their origin.' We must do Miss Graham the justice to say that, scanty and imperfect as her description is of the rocks and ruins of this extraordinary place, it is far superior to

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any thing that, we believe, has hitherto appeared on the subject. Indeed we know of no other account than that which is given by Mr. Duncan in the first volume of the Asiatic Transactions, and that which has since been stolen from it by a spurious Dutchman whose work we noticed in the thirteenth number of our Review.

In the village is a temple dedicated to Vishnu, supported by four slender and curiously wrought pillars, each consisting of a single stone, the shaft being about twenty-five feet. These support a small dome covered with carved work. Beyond this are several caverns supported by pillars whose sides are sculptured with groups of figures. 'The face of a large rock is carved into above a hundred figures of men and animals, mostly of the natural size, though some are much larger, and some rather smaller, representing the tapass of Ajoon, or the sacred austerities practised by that hero, in order to obtain from Vishnu a celestial weapon, which was to give him power over all his enemies.' Of this sculpture there is an etching from a drawing by Colonel Mackenzie. There is also a very beautiful print resembling the teer (place of religious retirement) of Arjoon, being a highly finished temple, thirty feet high, cut out of one single mass of stone. On the top of the cave in which the tapass of Arjoon is sculptured, is a stone couch, with a lion for a pillow, called the Rajah Dhurma's lion-throne.' Innumerable other caves, ruined temples, tanks and store figures of men and animals are scattered round, many of them choked up and overgrown with the rank jungle. But the most curious, perhaps, are the five rutts or radums, called models of temples, of which there is an admirable print from a drawing by Miss Graham: they stand in a grove of palmyras, and are each of one sin le block of a pale coloured granite. The first is plain, square and hollowed out, ten feet and three quarters long, and seventeen feet high.

. The second is also square, very much ornamented with figures and imitations of pinnacles and windows, twenty-six feet two inches long, and twenty-five and a half feet high.

The third is the largest, and has virandas round three of its sides; its length forty-seven feet, and height twenty-five and a half.

The fourth is of three stories, ornamented with galleries and figures, and covered with a dome, twenty-seven feet long, and thirty-six feet high.

The fifth is an elegant piece of workmanship, in the form of a horse shoe, with a portico at the flat end, and a double row of pilasters.

Opposite to the smallest of these rutts is placed the figure of a huge lion, near seven feet long, his head six feet and a half from

the

the sand in which he is buried midleg deep. It is sufficiently remarkable, as Miss Graham observes, that in a country where lions were never known to exist, the most ancient sculptures should abound with them, and that the name should be familiar in all their legends and histories.

The view of these objects, together with the loneliness of the place, the depth of the sands, and the distant roarings of the ocean, dispose the mind to meditate concerning the short duration of the monuments of human pride. History is altogether, and fable almost, silent, as to the authors of these works of taste and magnificence; they are forgot ten, and the memory of the arts which they practised has perished with them. The monuments they have left now adorn a desert, which nature, as if in scorn of man, seems to pride herself in decking with gay colours, and fresh smells of every delightful shrub and flower, whose author can never be mistaken.' There is a tradition that, during a grievous famine, one of the kings of India residing at his capital, the ancient and famous city of Mahaballipooram, which is now swallowed up by the sea, received certain artificers from the northern coun tries, with their wives and families, and engaged to feed them, on condition that they employed their talent of cutting and hewing stone to beautify his capital; and they accordingly began to form the rocks into temples and grottos, and to build pagodas, goparums (gateways,) and muntapoms (open temples,) but the famine ceasing, they returned to their own country, and left their work unfinished.'-(pp. 164-167.)

Instead of northern, it would probably be more correct to read western countries. Whoever has observed with attention the extraordinary excavations and sculptured rocks of Ellora, for the faithful representations of which we are indebted to the pencil of Mr. Daniell, will scarcely hesitate in making up his mind to a full conviction, that those who raised the pyramids and obelisks, the temples and palaces, and who sunk the catacombs and the labyrinths of Egypt, drew their ideas from the same source as those that hewed into temples the granite rocks of Mahaballipooram—that sculptured the caverns of Elephanta, Carli and Canara, and excavated the mountain of Ellora, in all of which we discover the rude outline of those inimitable specimens of art which, in later times, the fine taste of the Greeks brought to a degree of per fection which leaves us nothing to improve.

Miss Graham will readily perceive, by the attention which we have given to her labours, that we think not slightly of them. If we have a regret, it is that she has published her book in a form which must necessarily exclude it from general readers-but this is the vice of a luxurious age, which in time will correct itself.

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ART. IX. Memoirs of the late Reverend Theophilus Lindsey, A. M. including a brief Analysis of his Works: together with Anecdotes and Letters of eminent Persons, his Friends and Correspondents. Also a general View of the Progress of Unitarian Doctrine in England and America. By Thomas Belsham, Minister of the Chapel in Essex-street. 8vo. pp. 544.

T is a right inherent in every society to prescribe the conditions on which its members shall be admitted to offices of trust; and when the magistrate endows and incorporates the religion professed by the most numerous part of the community, so that it becomes the religion of the state, entitled to certain honours and emoluments annexed to the discharge of certain duties, the party who contracts for the payment may lawfully stipulate as to the nature and condition of the correspondent offices to be performed. This is the original principle of articles of Religion, which, under various modifications, have, in almost every age, and under every establishment of Christianity, been tendered to the acceptance of aspirants to the office of public teachers. The necessity of such a conduct is so universally admitted, that even those who dissent from all establishments, and clamour against all such impositions as either Fetters or snares to the consciences of men, virtually adopt it.Against the doctrine of subscriptions in general there ought, in consistency, to be no objection. The Bible, indeed, is an inspired test, and to that all are willing to conform themselves. The end of articles, however, being the preservation of religious peace and order, let it be considered how far a mere subscription to the Bible, and a declaration of conformity to the doctrines contained in it, would answer that end. According to the account of the respective parties, the Arminian and the Calvinist, the Unitarian and the Methodist, the Quaker and the disciple of Swedenborgh, all find their peculiar dogmata in the Bible, and all conform to its doctrines. Such a subscription, it is obvious, would be equivalent to none-would open a door to universal confusion, and, perhaps, end in general infidelity. Ministers of opposite principles would succeed each other in the same church; the people, bewildered and distracted by contradictions, would first quarrel and separate about particular doctrines, then become indifferent to all, and lastly believe and practise nothing.

It is, then, not against the doctrine of subscription to articles of religion in general, but to those of specific churches, or to some individual articles among them that objections are to be made. Applying this to the articles of the Church of England, it must in the first place be observed, that they were compiled in an era of religious light and knowledge, which has never since been

surpassed,

surpassed, and from which we have certainly declined; that amidst the incurable differences of human opinion, they have, during a period of more than two centuries and an half, obtained the cordial approbation of the learned, the pious and the upright; that notwithstanding the assent required to such a multitude of propositions, they have troubled the consciences of few, and excluded fewer still; and that in the mean time they have not only preserved their own church in a state of edifying harmony and peace, but formed a rallying point for numbers, who, from the want of such a standard, might have lost themselves in doubt and error. It cannot but be allowed then that there exists, in favour of our articles, a strong antecedent presumption.

We merely throw out this, as an answer, and a sufficient answer it is, to the crude calumnies of men who affect to speak of them as the product of some barbarous age, stuffed with the metaphysical jargon of the old schoolmen, and such as no inquisitive and well informed person, in these enlightened days, can either subscribe or teach without a certain measure of hypocrisy and prevarication. It is indeed incontrovertibly true, that every man has a conscience of his own, by which, and not by authority, he is to regulate his conduct; and if, after diligent and impartial inquiry, he should remain persuaded that propositions to which so many others have assented, are nevertheless false, though he may perchance suspect the soundness of his own understanding, still he must not deliberately affirm them to be true.

With such difficulties, therefore, it is not to be wondered that the subject of subscription has occasioned a copious expenditure of casuistry, good and bad. Yet it was comparatively late, before the spirit of doubt and hesitation arose. With the old Puritans, on the doctrinal articles at least, the Church of England was scarcely at issue. It was through the latitudinarian divines in the reign of Charles the Second, whose scorn and horror of the solemn grimace, the sanctimonious iniquity, of the former period had led them to confound their speculative principles with their political and moral conduct, that the change was first produced. This was principally conspicuous in their stile of preaching, in which the peculiar doctrines of Christianity began either to occupy a secondary place to mere morality, or to be explained in some qualified and diluted sense unknown to the first reformers. With the immediate followers of these men, about half a century after, the old dissenters themselves, who had hitherto upheld, with great zeal and vigour, the doctrines of the reformation, began to symbolize; and the secret introduction of the doctrines of Socinus among them, soon imparted a boldness and precipitance, unfettered by subscriptions, which led them far to outstrip their brethren of the establishment in the

race

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