the Indus, and, for the rest of his reign and that of his son, the Sikhs remained undisputed masters of the soil.

This people originally came before us, as the unobtrusive professors of doctrines peculiar for their simplicity and their peaceful tendency. Excited by the cries of a son breathing vengeance for the slaughter of his father and their priest, we have seen these peaceful devotees take up arms and commence a religious warfare against this persecution. Crushed, crushed to the ground by an overwhelming force, they had betaken themselves to the lair and adopted the habits of wild beasts, till the oppression of centuries excited the vengeful passions of the population of a whole country, and urged them to rise against the oppressor, adopting the tenets of a faith all but forgotten as the watchword of their warfare. We have seen them defeated and scattered to the four winds, but still returning when the tempest had blown over, and at length, when anarchy had reached its crisis, when the empire of Delhi on the south had been annihilated, and on the north the empire of Kábul was paralysed by internal convulsions, occupying and portioning out among themselves, as sovereign possessors, the soil, for the peaceful possession of which they had struggled, as cultivators. Cradled as they were in oppression, fighting only for plunder and existence, led on by no one mastermind, ignorant, reckless, possess ing the solitary virtues of bravery and independence of character, we cannot expect to find with them any system of government, or any of the organisation, which constitutes a state. The coast being clear, there being no ruler in the land, each band of plundering marauders under their respective chieftain lighted, like a cloud of locusts, on the soil. To each Sirdar, to each horseman, his share was allotted; and in that space of ground each individual assumed and exercised rights, to which no term can be applied but that of sovereign. The social structure of the village community remained unchanged, the conquering Sikh did not intrude himself into the number of the village shareholders, but he claimed from them, and exacted when he was able, that portion of the produce of the soil which the custom of ages in India has set aside to the maintenance of government, and which passed now into the hands of an individual, perhaps a cultivator himself in the adjoining village, but who had relinquished the ploughshare for the sword, and had enrolled himself among the followers of some successful freebooter.

This state of things was too anomalous to last the stronger swallowed up the weaker; the peasant brethren united and refused, unless coerced, to pay the share to those who had not the

power to exact it. The common enemy having retired, dissensions arose among the liberated chiefs themselves, and a field was found for the display of individual talent and enterprise. So, for the

vader molested these countries, no destroying army plundered the ripening harvests, still feud and internal dissension reigned throughout the land: villages were prosecuting hereditary quarrels with their neighbours. Secure in his petty fort, the Sikh chieftain was sometimes besieged by the peasants, at another time collecting his share of the produce with the assistance of hired ruffians. The owners of villages with strong natural defences threw off all connection with their nominal masters, while ambitious and enterprising chieftains were daily, by successful expeditions of plunder, increasing their possessions and reputation. Distinguished among these were the ancestors of Ranjit Singh, who were paving the way for the more comprehensive designs of their successor.

Ere we allude to these events, and the influence, which the English Government was soon to exert in these countries, we must introduce the history of the last invader, who descended from the mountains of Kábul to conquer Hindustán. Between the years 1795 and 1798 the youthful Shah Zemán, who had but just succeeded to the throne of Kábul, looking upon all the provinces up to the Jamná as his lawful dominions, three times invaded the Panjab and occupied Lahore. It was, however, the last expiring effort of the chivalry of the West. For 700 years, since the days of Sebektegin, these plains had been considered the lawful spoil of the hardy tribes who occupied the mountains, but their lease had now expired, and Shah Zemán was the last of the long line of Mahometan invaders. Let us pause for one moment, and consider the eventful history of him, whose name has just fallen from our pen. Born the heir to a throne then the most powerful in India, brought up amidst the prestige of the victories and successful invasions of his illustrious grandfather, who lorded it unrestrained over Hindustán, and had overpowered the united army of the Hindu race, himself during the lifetime of his father a successful warrior and the governor of a province, he seized the first opportunity of reasserting his claims to the provinces as far as the Jamná, and, leaguing with Tipú Sultan, the distant tyrant of Mysore, he conceived the magnificent project of re-establishing the power of the Crescent in Hindustán, of subduing the rebellious Hindu, and driving into the sea, whence they came, the intrusive Christians. Nor was the project chimerical, nor the danger slight, nor considered so by Lord Wellesley, then Governor-General of India. It was partly with reference to this projected invasion of Shah Zemán, the rumours of which alarmed the Council Board of Calcutta, that measures so decisive were adopted against Tipú, that half his dominions were rent from the sovereign of Oudh as payment of a subsidiary force, and other means of defence devised to defeat the hopes of the youthful invader. Vain hopes! a few years saw him

For twenty years the sport of fortune and the sharer of the evil fate of his ill-starred brother Shah Shúja, he at length found a refuge at Lúdíana, and a maintenance from the spontaneous generosity of that very people, whose expulsion from India had been one of his dearest objects. As if fate were not content with the vicissitudes of his youth and manhood, he was doomed in his old age to leave his peaceful asylum to return in a species of mock and illusory triumph to the capital of the kingdom, which forty years before had been his own. Ejected thence, he once more returned a fugitive to die in the place of his former exile. The writer of these pages, in 1845, saw and spoke to him in the last year of his eventful life, and will not soon forget the blind and aged monarch, on whose forehead time and care had written many a wrinkle, who in the midst of squalor and poverty seated himself on his old bed as upon a throne, and still spoke in the language and assumed the air of a sovereign, whose whole troubled life was a memorable example of the instability of human greatness, the last of the great Duráni dynasty.

1

But to return to the history of these countries. Although the army of the Peishwa was entirely defeated, and with incredible slaughter, at the battle of Panipat, the power of the Maráthas was in no degree diminished: it seemed to have received new vigour from the blow, and to possess a hydra-headed vivacity. The power of the Peishwa himself was broken, but under the guidance of Holkar, the Bhúnsla, and Scindia, the Marátha arms still continued paramount in India, and the regular battalions of the latter under De Boigne, Perron, and Louis Bourquet were in possession of Delhi and the country up to the Jamná; nor did their arms cease there. Every chief of note south of the Satlaj was a tributary to the Marátha, and we find the youthful Ranjit Singh at the commencement of this century, while his power was still scarcely superior to that of a petty Sirdar, entering into a treaty with General Perron, the substance of which was the assistance of a force of regular battalions to establish his power in the country, and the payment of a share of the revenue to the Marátha of the provinces brought into subjection by such means. This was indeed never acted upon, but the empire of the Maráthas was acknowledged by Ranjit Singh, and indisputable up to the Satlaj, though the puzzled antiquary will scarcely recognise in "Louis Saheb," the name under which Louis Bourquet is familiarly known among the Sikh states, the formidable lieutenant of Scindia, and the gallant opponent of the English arms at the battle of Delhi. Still more puzzled would the antiquary be, if he heard mention made of the

1 Fourteen years later the writer saw and spoke to the old king of Delhi, seated amidst the ruins of his palace at Delhi, the last of the great Moghal

victories of "Jaházi Sahib," of the chiefs whom he set up, and the heavy fines which he exacted. He would scarcely recognise George Thomas, a name much dreaded and renowned among the Sikh peasantry. This remarkable man, a sailor by profession, whence his Indian name, availed himself of the state of affairs into which he was thrown, and by dint of perseverance, military skill, and great personal valour, carved out for himself a small principality, and had he had only natives to contend with would have held it. In him was most remarkably displayed that energy of character which distinguishes the European from the Asiatic. We find him refusing to desert the cause of his friends, daring his foes to do their worst, bringing into subjection a district previously uncontrollable, building forts, casting cannon, and training levies. Appealed to by the widow of Roy Ilias, a Mahometan chief, whose territory bordered upon the Satlaj, to support her against her oppressors, he marched from Hansi, his capital, to Rai Kote, through a hostile country, being himself in open warfare with the chiefs of the intervening space, whom he defeated more than once in battle. He was the first Englishman on the Satlaj, though to Lord Lake that honour is usually ascribed. What would have been his fate, had he been enabled to maintain himself in his principality of Hansi, till, by the fall of the Marátha power, he came into contact with the army of his own countrymen, can scarcely be guessed at; his power fell before the arms of Louis Bourquet, and, though permitted to retire to our provinces with the wealth which he had amassed, he died before his arrival at Calcutta. memoirs, however, which were published at the time, furnish an interesting example of what the energies of an uneducated man can do.

His

We have now arrived at the commencement of our own century, and we find the plains of Sarhind and the country adjoining occupied by independent Sikh chieftains, each man holding his village or his district by the sword, at deadly war with his neighbour, ready to take any and every advantage to improve his position, bound by no feelings of honour, no ties of blood, no sentiments of religion, when his own selfish interest interfered. Still all were nominally or really under the paramount sway of Scindia. The power of that chieftain fell before the arms of the Duke of Wellington, then Sir Arthur Wellesley, and Lord Lake, and all the country north of Jodhpur and Jaipúr were, by the treaty, ratified in December 1803, ceded without reserve to the English. Our right, as successor to Scindia, of supremacy to the Satlaj was indisputable, and was never renounced by us; and, had the mastermind which then ruled the destinies of India been uncontrolled, that supremacy would doubtless have been exerted and maintained.

For twenty years the sport of fortune and the sharer of the evil fate of his ill-starred brother Shah Shúja, he at length found a refuge at Lúdíana, and a maintenance from the spontaneous generosity of that very people, whose expulsion from India had been one of his dearest objects. As if fate were not content with the vicissitudes of his youth and manhood, he was doomed in his old age to leave his peaceful asylum to return in a species of mock and illusory triumph to the capital of the kingdom, which forty years before had been his own. Ejected thence, he once more returned a fugitive to die in the place of his former exile. The writer of these pages, in 1845, saw and spoke to him in the last year of his eventful life, and will not soon forget the blind and aged monarch, on whose forehead time and care had written many a wrinkle, who in the midst of squalor and poverty seated himself on his old bed as upon a throne, and still spoke in the language and assumed the air of a sovereign, whose whole troubled life was a memorable example of the instability of human greatness, the last of the great Duráni dynasty.

1

But to return to the history of these countries. Although the army of the Peishwa was entirely defeated, and with incredible slaughter, at the battle of Panipat, the power of the Maráthas was in no degree diminished: it seemed to have received new vigour from the blow, and to possess a hydra-headed vivacity. The power of the Peishwa himself was broken, but under the guidance of Holkar, the Bhúnsla, and Scindia, the Marátha arms still continued paramount in India, and the regular battalions of the latter under De Boigne, Perron, and Louis Bourquet were in possession of Delhi and the country up to the Jamná; nor did their arms cease there. Every chief of note south of the Satlaj was a tributary to the Marátha, and we find the youthful Ranjit Singh at the commencement of this century, while his power was still scarcely superior to that of a petty Sirdar, entering into a treaty with General Perron, the substance of which was the assistance of a force of regular battalions to establish his power in the country, and the payment of a share of the revenue to the Marátha of the provinces brought into subjection by such means. This was indeed never acted upon, but the empire of the Maráthas was acknowledged by Ranjit Singh, and indisputable up to the Satlaj, though the puzzled antiquary will scarcely recognise in "Louis Saheb," the name under which Louis Bourquet is familiarly known among the Sikh states, the formidable lieutenant of Scindia, and the gallant opponent of the English arms at the battle of Delhi. Still more puzzled would the antiquary be, if he heard mention made of the

1 Fourteen years later the writer saw and spoke to the old king of Delhi, seated amidst the ruins of his palace at Delhi, the last of the great Moghal