many. Tamerlane, the scourge of the Turks, and conqueror of a great part of Asia, was of the race of Genghis Khan. Babar, great-grandson of Tamerlane, subdued all between Samarcand and Agra in the empire of the Mogul. The descendants of these conquerors reign in India, Persia, and China, and have assimilated themselves to the habits and manners of the countries subdued by their arms; but Tartary itself is still no more than a vast desert, inhabited by wandering tribes, who follow the lives of the ancient Scythians.

THIBET.

This southern portion of Tartary, exhibits the phenomenon of a kingdom governed by a living god, the Dalai Lama, or Great Lama, whose divinity is acknowledged not only by his own subjects, but over China and a part of India. This god is a young man whom the priests educate to his function, and in whose name, they, in reality, govern the kingdom.

A

HE earliest accounts of this great tract of civilized country are those of Herodotus, who lived about a century before Alexander the Great; and it is remarkable that the character given of the people by that early writer corresponds perfectly with that of the modern Hindus. He had probably taken his accounts from Scylax of Cariandria, whom Darius Hystaspes had sent to explore the country. But it was not until the age of Alexander that the Greeks had any particular knowledge of that extraordinary people. Alexander penetrated into the Punjaub, where, his troops refusing to proceed, he embarked on the Hydaspes, which runs into the Indus, and thence pursued his course for above one thousand miles to the ocean. The narrative given by Arrian of this expedition was taken from the mouths of Alexander's officers; and its particulars tally yet more remarkably than those of Herodotus with the modern manners of the Hindus.

India was visited by Seleucres, to whose share it fell in the partition of Alexander's empire; and Antiochus the Great, two hundred years afterward, made a short expedition thither. It is probable, too, that some small intercourse subsisted between the Greek empire of Bactriana and India; but till the fifteenth century, no European power thought of forming any establishment in that country; though, from the age of Alexander down to the period of the Portuguese discoveries, there had constantly been some commercial intercourse between Europe and India, both by sea and across the desert. The Mahometans, as early as A.D. 1000, had begun to establish an empire in India. Mahmoud,

a Tartar, conquered a great part of the country and established his capital at Ghauza, or Ghuznee, near the sources of the Indus, extirpating, wherever he came, the Hindu religion, and establishing the Mahometan in its stead. Mahomet Gori, in 1194, penetrated to Benares, the principal seat, school, or university of Brahminical learning and one of his successors, fixed the seat of his empire at Delhi, which continued to be the capital of the Mogul princes so long as their empire in India continued. The sovereignty founded by Mahmoud was overwhelmed in 1222 by GenghisKhan, who did not, however, extend his conquests far into the peninsula. Genghis-Khan's empire in the following century was overthrown by Tamerlane, who first turned his arms against Hindustan in 1398, and whose posterity continued to the last on the throne of the Mogul empire.

The Mogul empire was, even in the beginning of the eighteenth century, the most powerful and flourishing of the Asiatic monarchies, under Aurengzebe, the son of Schah-Gean, who, though a monster of cruelty, and most despotic tyrant, enjoyed a life prolonged to nearly a hundred years, crowned with uninterrupted prosperity and success. He died in the year 1707, in the ninetieth year of his age, having established an empire reaching from the 10th to the 35th degree of latitude, and nearly as much in longitude; but so weighty a sceptre, like the sceptre of Charlemagne, required the hand of Aurengzebe to wield it: from the moment of his death things fell into confusion; and in the course of fifty years a succession of weak and wicked princes reduced this mighty empire to nothing.

The dominion of the Mogul was not absolute over

all the countries which composed his empire. Tamerlane allowed the petty princes, rajahs or nabobs, to retain their territories, of which many of their descendants are at this day in possession. They paid a tribute to the Great Mogul, as an acknowledgment of his sovereignty, and observed the treaties agreed to by their ancestors; but they were in other respects independent princes, and by no means indisposed to revolt upon any tempting or favorable opportunity.

Bengal became a part of the Mogul's empire by conquest in the end of the sixteenth century, and was commonly governed by a son of the Great Mogul, who had under him several inferior nabobs, the former princes of the country. Such was its condition when the British East India Company,-who in the year 1716 first obtained the famous firman or grant by which their goods of export and import were exempted from duties or customs, and which is regarded as their great Commercial Charter,— between 1751 and 1760, conquered and obtained possession of that kingdom, together with Bahar and part of Orissa, a large, populous, and most flourishing country, containing above 10,000,000 of inhabitants, and producing an immense revenue. The East India Company thus obtained the benefit of the whole commerce of the Mogul empire, with Arabia, Persia, and Thibet, as well as with the kingdoms of Azen, Aracan, Pegu, Siam, Malacca, China, and many of the Oriental islands. The subsequent history of the progress of the British empire in India, will have to be narrated in its proper place.

ANCIENT STATE OF INDIA,-MANNERS, LAWS, ARTS, SCIENCES, AND RELIGION OF THE HINDUS.

The remains of the ancient knowledge of the Hindus have been preserved by a hereditary priesthood, in the Sanscrit language, long since extinct, and only known to a few of the Brahmins. The zeal of some learned Europeans has opened that source of information, whence we learn the most interesting particulars of this extraordinary people, perhaps the most early cultivators of the sciences, and the instructors of all the nations of antiquity. The whole body of the people was divided into four orders or castes. The highest, that of the Brahmins, was devoted to religion, and the cultivation.

of the sciences; to the second belonged the preservation of the state-they were its sovereigns, and its magistrates in peace, and its soldiers in war; the third were the husbandmen and merchants; and the fourth, the artisans, laborers, and servants. These are inseparable distinctions and descend from generation to generation. Moreover, the individuals of each class follow invariably the professions of their forefathers. Every man, from his birth, knows the function allotted to him, and fulfils with care and satisfaction the duty which he cannot avoid. Hence arises that permanence of manners and institutions which so singularly characterizes this ancient nation. This classification is an artificial arrangement, which could have originated only from the mind of a legislator among a polished people, completely obedient to government. therefore, a proof of the highly civilized state of the Hindu nation in the most remote periods of antiquity. The civil policy of the Hindus is another proof of the same fact. At the time of Alexander the Great, India was divided into large and powerful kingdoms, governed by sovereigns whose dominion was not absolute, but controlled by the superior authority of the Brahmins.

It is,

A system of feudalism has ever prevailed in India: the right to lands flows from the sovereign, to whom a certain duty is payable by the class of the husbandmen, who transmit their possessions to their children under the same tenure. Strabo and Diodorus remarked among the Indians three classes of officers: one whose department was the regulation of agriculture, tanks, highways; another which superintended the police of the cities; a third which regulated the military department. The same policy prevailed in recent times under the Hindu princes.

The jurisprudence of Hindustan is an additional proof of great antiquity and civilization. The Ayen-Akbery, and still more the compilation of Hindu laws from the ancient Sanscrit records, made by order of Mr. Hastings, contain the jurisprudence of a refined and commercial people, among whom law itself has been a study and profession.

Many monuments exist in India of the advanced state of the useful and elegant arts in the remotest periods of antiquity. The ancient pagodas, of vast extent and magnificence-whether cut in the solid rock, as in Elephanta and Salsette, or in the open air, as at Chillambrum and Seringham; the sumpt