the Belgravia of the Elizabethan period, and these
tenements answered to the Buckingham Palace, the
Stafford House, and the Opera of the present century,
I cannot tell;  the numerous retainers of Leicester
have long since disappeared, though they have left the
Bears and a very considerable Ragged Staff behind
them; and the only records of Alleyne's Shakespearian
talents that remain are the Othellos which are hung
up at the doors of the dealers in marine stores.

RENT DAY ROUND MADRAS.

WILKIE'S Rent Day is a picture that
suggests a British union of business and
enjoyment; carving of beef here; counting
of money there.  In the Madras Presidency
there is a picture of our Indian Rent Day,
more striking than pleasant, which belongs
to the whole presidency, and is to be seen
anywhere but in Madras itself.  It is a native
picture, say the Europeans, who decline to
look at it; but we think it may boast— ugly
as it is— of being exhibited in sort, under the
patronage of the East India Company, as
we shall show.  The picture itself is so much
worse than Wilkie's, as being more disgusting
than pleasant.  Let its horrors appear
incidentally in the course of the brief
criticism, upon which we are about to enter.
A full sketch of it may be referred to by one
who has a taste for diablerie in the Report of
the Commissioners of Inquiry into the alleged
cases of Torture in the Madras Presidency.
Three eminent Indian lawyers are the reporting
gentlemen.

Indifferent as we are in England about
Indian affairs, there are few who do not
know that more than one-half of the entire
revenue of that vast empire consists of a
land-tax or rent, which is exacted from the
occupiers by the government, as it had been
exacted from time immemorial by the various
native dynasties which preceded us in the
supreme authority.  The system of tenure
differs in the several presidencies; in some
of which a superior class, called zemindars,
or proprietors, hold direct from the government,
and sublet the land to the agent or
occupier; while in others, the intermediate
grade of zemindar is unknown, the ryots
themselves holding immediately under the
government.  Of both these forms of tenure
there are many local varieties, but this general
distinction between them is sufficient to
render perfectly intelligible the condition of
the land question in Madras, in which presidency
the ryotwarry system exclusively
prevails.

In Madras, therefore, the Honourable
Company is not only the head landlord ; but
the sole landlord.  No proprietor, no middleman,
no intermediate grade whatever interposes
between the actual cultivator of the
soil and the great company which is at once
his seigneur and his sovereign.  The Honourable
Company itself lets the land, fixes the
rent, raises or lowers the rent, and collects
the rent.  It does not even farm out the collection
to certain great contractors (as was
formerly done for the various departments
of the revenue), leaving to these
contractors the responsibility of employing
in the business of collection whatever
class of agents and whatever form of
machinery they may deem expedient.  For
the purpose of rent-getting the presidency is
divided into a number of pleasant little districts,
each comprising some three or four
thousand square miles and containing from
half a million to a million of inhabitants;
and over each of these is placed a British
head-collector, who, besides making his own
fortune within the limited time, during which
a European constitution can remain proof
against the climate, is expected to supervise
the collection of the entire revenue of the
district, whether from land-tax, water-tax,
or the licences to practise the various trades
or callings which form the several sources of
the Honourable Company's revenue.  To assist
him in this duty a large staff of tahsildars,
monigars, curnoms, duffadars, peons, taliaries,
and other nondescript native officials of high
and low degree, is spread through the several
villages of the district — but, as this native
staff is described by unexceptionable witnesses,
as little better than a delusion, as
the bane and pest of society, and as banded
together, from the highest to the lowest, for
the common purpose of extorting illicit gains,
and of mutual protection from discovery
— it may be doubted, whether on the
whole, their services are precisely such as
if we were very particular as to the interests
of the parties concerned, we should desire
to see employed in the collection of public
money, or in the delicate negociations between
the Honourable East India Company and the
miserable defaulters in the land-tax. Connected
with this department, there is also
another Indian institution, which may seem
a little harsh to English readers.  We at
home should object if the collector of
income-tax, poor-rate, or county-rate were
empowered to proceed summarily, by his own
authority ; and, without the interposition of a
magistrate, or of any civil process whatsoever,
to arrest the person of the defaulter.
Even in India itself, bad as things were, this
used to be unlawful.  But the Honourable
Company is strict in money matters ; and,
by an enactment, now about forty years old,
all authority, whether of the revenue, the
police, or the magistracy, is vested in the
same set of officials — those very gentlemen
who are declared thieves by their friends.

Rent-day, then, round Madras is not like
Rent-day in Great Britain.  The rents which
are there collected are not the rents of a
mere private proprietor, but of the Honourable
Company itself.  The officials who figure
on the Indian scene are not the steward, or
bailiff, of some great estates in the Highlands,
or in Connemara ; they are every