CHAP. XI.]

convicted the defendant, had they not felt that the real sting of the alleged profaneness was the severity of the political satire. Although the indictment stated that these parodies were seditious as well as profane, the sedition was studiously kept in the background. Had they not been really prosecuted for their political doctrines, their unquestionable indecency and impropriety must have carried a verdict against them on the first trial. The second and third trials looked like persecution; and public opinion threw its shield over the offender.

A letter from Mr Ward (Lord Dudley) to the Bishop of Llandaff, exhibits a striking example of the difference of opinion that existed in high quarters as to the prosecution of Hone. The personal friend of George Canning, writing to a most pious and learned dignitary of the church, responds to the sentiments of that dignitary that this transaction was uncalled for and oppressive. 'I am particularly gratified with what you say about the business of Hone. It is an additional proof, if any were wanting, of your superiority to those prejudices with which place and profession might have inspired a man of less sound understanding, and a less independent character. I have been inclined all along to think, and what you say confirms me in the opinion, that the prosecution was discreditable to the government and its law advisers. Not that I believe they were actuated by tyrannical principles. It was a mere blunder; but the success of it would have afforded a very mischievous precedent for bad times. Certainly this man meant no good either to church or state; and that is reason enough for the whole race of methodistical Tories-who are guided entirely by their own feelings as to the particular case, without any regard to, or knowledge of, the general principles of justice-to be sadly grieved that his ears were not cropped, as they would have been by the Star-Chamber. That famous tribunal no doubt had its merits. It punished many scoundrels that could not have been got at by a regular course of law, and was therefore an object of admiration so long as it lasted, and of regret when it fell, to precisely the same sort of persons that now mourn over the acquittal of Hone.'

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most solemn disclaimer was uttered, through this universal mourning, of the foul calumny against the people, that they were desirous of a vital change in their laws and institutions. Whatever might be their complaints, they shewed, on this occasion, that their attachment to a constitutional monarchy was undiminished by factious contests or real grievances; and that they looked with exulting hopes to the days when a patriot queen should diffuse the sunlight of just government through every corner of a prosperous and happy land.

The affection which the people of Great Britain cherished for the Princess Charlotte was ardent, but it was discriminating. It was a tribute to principles and to conduct. It was something much better than that unreflecting gallantry which would have called 'a thousand swords from their scabbards' to have defended personal charms; it was the admiration of private virtue disciplining itself for public service. The Princess Charlotte seemed born to build up for generations the succession to the British crown, by calling around her own person the warmest devotion of a zealous but a reflecting people. A female sovereign can best make duty choice, and obedience happiness. What the birth of this princess promised, her education ripened, and her own love of real glory perfected. Her early years were devoted to an assiduous preparation for her maturer honours. Her studies were manly, and such as befitted the probable successor to the glories of an Elizabeth. She was disciplined in the school of religion and of philosophy. While she was habituated to those Christian exercises, in the performance of which the reigning sovereign and his family furnished so excellent an example, she stored up lessons for future practice in her probable destiny, by a ceaseless contemplation of the characters of the truly great of all ages and countries. She knew the fountains of her country's glory, she reverenced the founders of its well-balanced constitution; her heart vowed an early allegiance to her nation's liberty. In the cultivation of the accomplishments of her sex, while she displayed an almost unlimited talent, she never lost sight of their legitimate ends and uses. Her exercises and her amusements were equally associated with her preparation for domestic and public duties. The people exulted in the maturity of her person and her mind. She stood, as was hoped amongst her future subjects, a beautiful, an accomplished, a noble-hearted woman. She seemed equally fitted to command reverence by the strength, and win affection by the graces, of her mind. Her state was not supported by ostentation; her greatness was not asserted by pride; her dignity did not estrange her from the lowly and the poor. Raised above the great portion of society, she deeply felt her alliance with the universal family of the earth; and while her endeavour was to purify herself from the follies and weaknesses of mankind, she delighted to partake their sympathies, to assuage their misfortunes, to merit, by her benevolence, the homage which was paid to her rank.

A princess so gifted was not a being that would permit her affections to be sacrificed at the altar of political calculation. She well knew that domestic

accom

name first occurs in Indian history about the end of the seventeenth century. From obscure freebooters, they rose into sufficient consequence to be deemed useful auxiliaries by the different Mahratta powers, whose desultory mode of warfare was suited to their own habits. From their preceding or panying Mahratta armies, the Pindarrees became occasionally confounded with the Mahrattas, though they were always considered by the latter as essentially distinct, and so immeasurably inferior as not to be allowed to eat with them, or even to be seated in their presence. Occasionally the Mahratta rulers purchased their aid by grants of land, or by a tacit admission of their right to possess tracts which they had already usurped. But the more usual price paid for their assistance was the privilege of plundering, even beyond the ordinary licence given to a Mahratta army. At times some of their durras acted for one Mahratta chief, and some on the opposite side for another Mahratta chief; and it occasionally happened that all the durras leagued themselves against the whole Mahratta confederacy, plundering the territories of the Peishwa, Scindia, the Nagpoor rajah, &c., indiscriminately. As the Pindarree chiefs acquired reputation, their claims to the services of their adherents became hereditary, and were transmitted to their descendants. Gangs and tribes were cemented in federal union, and common motives of action led to the establishment of a community of interest throughout the whole of this community of robbers. The very looseness of the composition of their union was favourable to its increase, as it admitted all castes and all faiths, and offered a ready refuge to poverty, indolence, and crime to all that was floating and unattached in the frequently revolutionised communities of Central India. What their numbers were, could at no time be correctly estimated: they varied with circumstances, being thinned by failure, and swelled by success. 'It is also to be observed,' says Sir John Malcolm, 'that the Pindarrees were fed and nourished by the very miseries they created; for, as their predatory invasions extended, property became insecure, and those who were ruined by their depredations were afterwards compelled to have recourse to a life of violence, as the only means of subsistence left them. They joined the stream which they could not withstand, and endeavoured to redeem their own losses by the plunder of others.' The strategy of these overgrown bodies of banditti I will shew at once how difficult it was either to suppress them or intercept them. When they set out on an expedition, they placed themselves under the guidance of one or more chosen leaders, called lubburiahs, who were selected on account of their knowledge of the country that it was meant to plunder. The Pindarrees were encumbered neither with tents nor baggage; each horseman carried a few cakes of bread for his own subsistence, and some feeds of grain for his horse. The party, which usually consisted of two or three thousand good horse, with a proportion of mounted followers, advanced at the rapid rate of forty or fifty miles a day, turning neither to the right nor left till they arrived at their place of destination. They

then divided and made a sweep of all the cattle and property they could find, committing at the same time the most horrid atrocities, and destroying what they could not carry away. They trusted to the secrecy and suddenness of the irruption for avoiding those who guarded the frontiers of the countries they invaded; and before a force could be brought against them, they were on their return. Their chief strength lay in their being intangible. If pursued, they made marches of extraordinary length-sometimes upwards of sixty miles-by roads almost impracticable for regular troops. If overtaken, they dispersed, and reassembled at an appointed rendezvous; if followed to the country from which they issued, they broke into small parties. Their wealth, their booty, and their families, were scattered over a wide region, in which they found protection amid the mountains and in the fastnesses belonging to themselves, or to those with whom they were either openly or secretly connected; but nowhere did they present any point of attack; and the defeat of a party, the destruction of one of their cantonments, or the temporary occupation of some of their strongholds, produced no effect beyond the ruin of an individual freebooter, whose place was instantly supplied by another, generally of more desperate fortune, and, therefore, more eager for enterprise.' They never fought when they could run away; they considered it wisdom to plunder and fly, but folly to stay and fight. Even when acting with the Mahrattas as auxiliaries, their object was plunder, not war. They went before, indeed, but it was only by surprise or in defenceless provinces; they were, from their very origin, the scavengers of the Mahrattas; and though in the van, they had little more pretension to martial conduct or valour than had the birds and beasts of prey that followed in their and their allies' rear. Some of their chiefs, however, united to the qualities so essential to their profession-activity, cunning, ready enterprise, presence of mind, and promptitude of resources-a wonderful strength of mind, or it might be apathy, in bearing the reverses of fortune and the privations of their lot. Foremost among these chiefs was Cheetoo. This man first attracted the attention of the English towards the end of 1806, when, raising himself on the temporary ruin of Kureem, another Pindarree chief, who had incurred the displeasure of one of the Mahratta potentates, and had been inveigled and made prisoner, he united the durras or bands of many other leaders under his own standard, and prepared to commit depredations on an unprecedentedly grand scale. Numerous and profitable to himself, and altogether ruinous to the inhabitants of many wide districts of Hindostan, were the expeditions undertaken by Cheetoo on his own account. But in 1811, the captive Pindarree, Kureem, purchasing his liberty from the Mahrattas, returned to the scenes of his former power, and soon obtained his former supremacy. To make up for lost time, and to restore his reputation among the robbers, Kureem laid his plans to effect a general combination of all the Pindarree bands, for a predatory expedition more extensive than any that had hitherto been made. Cheetoo was obliged to follow

the example of the majority of his fellow-chiefs; and at the great gathering of 1811, his durra made part of 25,000 cavalry of all descriptions, that were ready, under the command of Kureem, to march against and plunder the city of Nagpoor, the large and populous capital of the Boonsla Mahrattas. But Cheetoo, who continued to hate Kureem as a rival, plotted against him, sold himself to his enemies, and went over to them with all his durra. Not long after this he entirely ruined Kureem, and obliged him to flee with his diminished adherents to a distant country. Cheetoo again shone forth on his rival's eclipse, and at his cantonment near Nemawur, in the province of Malwah, on the north bank of the Nerbudda, no fewer than 15,000 horse annually assembled to issue forth to plunder. As the territories of the Company and those of its protected allies offered the richest booty, the eyes of the Pindarrees were always bent in that direction. This imposed the necessity of constant vigilance along the whole extent of the south-west frontier of the Bengal presidency; while, for the security of the Deccan, the subsidiary forces of the Nizam and Peishwa were annually obliged to move to the frontiers of their respective territories; and notwithstanding all these precautions, those states were constantly penetrated and overrun by the marauders.

The reverses and losses sustained in the first campaign in Nepaul, in 1814, encouraged the Pindarrees. In October 1815, when our main army was fully occupied in forcing the stockades of the Goorkhas, Cheetoo crossed the Nerbudda with nearly 8000 of his Pindarrees. On the southern side of the river they broke into two parties and took opposite routes. Major Fraser, with 300 sepoys and 100 irregular native horse, surprised one of the parties in a bivouac, and made them suffer some loss before they could mount, gallop off, and disperse. But this did not deter them from continuing their depredations as far as the black river, the Krishna or Kistnah. The other party, which had met with no such molestation, traversed the whole of the territory of our ally the Nizam of the Deccan, from north to south, and also appeared on the banks of the Kistnah. The territories of our Madras presidency lay on the other side of the river, and were saved from devastation only by the fortuitous circumstance of the river's continuing not fordable so unusually late in the season as the 20th of November. 'Finding the Kistnah impassable, the freebooters took a turn eastward, plundering the country for several miles along its populous and fertile banks, and committing every kind of enormity. On approaching the frontier of Masulipatam, they shaped their course northward, and returned along the line of the Godavouree (Godavery) and Whurdah, passing to the east of all Colonel Doveton's positions, and making good their route to Nemawur (Cheetoo's head-quarters), with an immense booty collected in the Nizam's dominions, and with utter impunity.' Elated by his success, Cheetoo planned and proclaimed a second lubbur, or raid, immediately upon the return of the first. The Pindarrees again flocked in from every side to join in it; and by the 5th of February 1816, 10,000 horsemen had again crossed the Nerbudda from Nemawur.

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This time, the Company's territories did not escape. On the 10th of March, leaving plundered and burning villages in their rear, the Pindarrees appeared on the western frontier of the district of Masulipatam, under the Madras presidency. From this point they pressed southward. On the 11th they made a march of thirty-three miles, plundered seventy-two villages, and committed the most horrid cruelties upon the inoffensive and helpless villagers. On the next day they destroyed fifty-four villages, marched thirtyeight miles, and arrived at the civil station of Guntoor. Here they plundered a considerable part of the town, and the houses of all the civil officers; but, steady to their system of never risking life or limb in battle, they shrunk from the collector's office, where the government treasure and the persons of the British residents were protected by a handful of sepoys and invalids. The robbers went off as they came, suddenly and noiselessly. That night there was not one of them to be seen in the neighbourhood; and before the next day closed, they were more than fifty miles from Guntoor, looking westward for more defenceless villages. They swept through the Kirpah or Cuddapah district, and, after being twelve days within the Company's frontier, they recrossed the Kistnah. A squadron of native cavalry belonging to the Madras establishment reached the opposite bank of the Kistnah, just after they had made good their passage. Further to the west there were numerous detachments of the Company's troops scouring the country in all directions, yet the plunderers escaped without the least brush. Shortly after recrossing the Kistnah, the marauders broke up into separate bodies. The greater part moved along the north bank of the Kistnah, passing south of Hyderabad, until they approached the Peishwa's dominions. Then, turning short to the north, they retraced their steps to the Nerbudda, in several divisions and by various routes. Colonel Doveton came close up with one of the divisions as it was passing a ghaut, but still the robbers escaped untouched. Another and a larger body was equally fortunate in escaping from the colonel, who had obtained from a Pindarree prisoner a clue to its movements, and who had made sure of cutting it up. It was soon afterwards ascertained that nearly the whole of these Pindarrees who had passed the Nerbudda on the 5th of February, had recrossed it before the 17th of May, bringing a second immense harvest of booty to Nemawur within the year. It was ascertained by a commission appointed for the express purpose of the investigation, that, during the twelve days the ferocious banditti remained within the Company's frontiers, three hundred and thirty-nine villages had been plundered, one hundred and eighty-two individuals put to a cruel death, five hundred and five severely wounded, and no less than three thousand six hundred and three subjected to different kinds of torture.

The governor-general obtained certain information that the Peishwa, Scindia, and other Mahratta potentates, were in close and friendly correspondence with the robbers, and that Mahratta agents had visited Cheetoo's cantonment at Nemawur, just before the last raid was undertaken; and there was