in a tunnel. The tunnel was unfinished—the
trip, therefore, ended in it, and its cave was
used as a cool saloon. A few complimentary
speeches having been made, all hands got on
board the train again, and rolled back to
Bombay. The bridge, when they went under
it the second time, was quite deserted.

Thus it was that the Indian railway system
crept into existence.

The fact that a train had been running to
Tannah and back was casually mentioned
at some mess tables in town that evening,
but did not excite much more interest in the
English than it had excited in the native
mind. The opening of the Liverpool and
Manchester railway is at home regarded as
one of the greatest historical events of the
present century. Perhaps a hundred years
hence, this record of the way in which the
first train was seen in India may be read with
interest in households accustomed to hear of
such lines as the direct Calais and Mooltan,
or out of which some son may have gone by
the express train from Boulogne to Lahore.
For, hereafter, mail trains shall run nightly
through the plains of the Indus, and scream
in the deserts of Beloochistan; passengers
shall look out of their carriage windows at
the Persian Gulf as they fly by; and farmers
speculate upon the corn crops while they pass
through Mesopotamia. All this is inevitably
to come. Although India has made the small
beginning, which I stood on the bridge and
saw made, there is no silencing that steam
whistle or stopping the rapid advance of the
giant locomotive.

OFF! OFF!

I WAS reflecting the other day with a good
deal of satisfaction upon the improved spirit
of modern criticism. Certainly, the reading
public has reason to be rejoiced that good
sense, good taste and right feeling have pretty
nearly discountenanced that pungency of
ridicule and bitterness of invective with
which critics were wont to assail authors, and
that fierceness of retort and defiant tu quo-queism
wherewith the book-writer retaliated
upon the reviewer. It appears by this time
to be generally understood that such exhibitions
were most unseemly and disgraceful to
the actors engaged in them, and that their
tendency in all cases has been to degrade
literature. The wit and dexterity of Pope
can reconcile few of us now-a-days to the
gross personalities and filthy machinery of
The Dunciad, several of the heroes of which
might have found a sufficing vengeance upon
the poet in a court of law; and one needs not
to be very old to remember critical articles
in magazines of great reputation, written by
men of very vigorous minds and with uncommon
powers of humour, in which the
antecedents of an author, his person, and
sometimes (following Pope) even his poverty,
have been brought to bear against him by
way of accessaries to public scorn and
contempt. None of us can doubt, now, that
literature was herein degraded, and that the
responsibility which is upon all men—but
especially upon men with those dangerous
weapons, pen and ink, in their hands—to be
temperate and forbearing was most blamefully
set at nought. Dull authors will
undoubtedly continue to write; and much
waste of vivacity will be shown in exposing
their sorry pretensions; and sprightly writers
will, as heretofore, be taken to task by very
self-sufficient and leaden critics; but it is to
be hoped that the day is gone by when the
publication of a bad poem subjected the
bard to a punishment hardly preferable
to the pillory; when the alleged vulgarity
of one author was denounced in the language
of Billingsgate, when his want of
feeling and nature was stigmatised with
utterly unfeeling and unnatural bitterness.

The crushing, extinguishing, tomahawking
system having been well nigh abolished,
there is one further reformaticm, in which
the interests of literature are deeply
concerned, that I could wish to see achieved.
The abuse of which I am about to speak
is one of which, I fancy, a moments consideration
will convince anybody of the expediency
of getting rid. It is so barbarous and
inhumane that it is not a little surprising
it ever obtained in countries boasting a
civilisation, however imperfect; but it is
altogether marvellous that it should have
been retained till hoar antiquity can come
forward and shake his venerable head against
its extinction.

The other evening I was at one of the
theatres when a piece was presented which
underwent that time-honoured process of
condemnation, which has an appropriate
name for it, likewise sanctioned by time.
In plain but theatrical language, it was
"damned." Now, it must be confessed, the
piece in question was indeed a sorry affair.
Professing an intent to be a side-splitter of
no ordinary width of aperture, it was conducive
rather to a pensive frame of mind,
in which the occasionally defective adaptation
of means to an end, and other infirmities
of human design, might be taken into
consideration. The piece deserved to die, and
suffered incontinently. But, while we applaud
the verdict of a jury, we do not
witness the execution; still less should we
consent to be present in court, were the
culprit to undergo his capital punishment
then and there. The mode of dealing the
fatal blow to this heavy dramatic trifle pained
me exceedingly; although, in former years,
I am grieved to remember, I have witnessed
much more violent demonstrations of popular
vengeance with comparative indifference,
even when I have seen the actors in distress,
and the ladies in the boxes pale with terror
at the "row," and agitated by sympathy for
the author.