my uncle and my mother, as the proper growth of a priory or some such
monastic establishment, I have been assured that nothing short of two
hundred thousand pounds ought, under the long tenure of office, to have
been remitted to England. But, then, said one of these gentlemen, if
your uncle lived (as I have heard that he did) in Calcutta and Meer-ut,
at the rate of four thousand pounds a year, _that_ would account
for a considerable share of a mine which else would seem to have been
worked in vain. Unquestionably, my uncle's system of living was under
no circumstances a self-denying one. To enjoy, and to make others
enjoy--_that_ was his law of action. Indeed, a more liberal creature,
or one of more princely munificence, never lived.

It might seem useless to call back any fragment of conversations
relating to India which passed more than fifty years ago, were it not
for two reasons: one of which is this,--that the errors (natural at
that time) which I vehemently opposed, not from any greater knowledge
that I had, but from closer reflection, are even now the prevailing
errors of the English people. My mother, for instance, uniformly spoke
of the English as the subverters of ancient thrones. I, on the
contrary, insisted that nothing political was ancient in India. Our own
original opponents, the Rajahs of Oude and Bengal, had been all
upstarts: in the Mysore, again, our more recent opponents, Hyder, and
his son Tippoo, were new men altogether, whose grandfathers were quite
unknown. Why was it that my mother, why is it that the English public
at this day, connect so false an image--that of high, cloudy antiquity
--with the thrones of India? It is simply from an old habit of
associating the spirit of change and rapid revolution with the
activities of Europe; so that, by a natural reaction of thought, the
Orient is figured as the home of motionless monotony. In things
religious, in habits, in costume, it _is_ so. But so far otherwise