one did not always care to understand what
they were talking about, and if one did, there
was a chance of asking at once. But, now,
that Indian news eclipses every other sort of
intelligence, it is a decided nuisance to be
pulled up in the middle of the most interesting
narrative by some unintelligible word.
Am I to sit down to my Times with a Tamil
lexicon on one side and a Teloogoo on the
other ?  Am I to waste my substance on
Sanscrit and Persian vocabularies before I
can sympathise with the sufferings of my
countrymen? Or must I go on, as at present,
stumbling blindly from one guess to another?
Why do the mutineers never rob, or steal, or
thieve, or plunder ? Why do they always loot?
The practice, at least, is old, and why should
the word be new? Again, why do they cut
off the dâks, and why is there a circumflex
accent over the a? What is a dâk ? Is it
alive? Or is it a road, or a river, or a water
course, or something perfectly dissimilar to
anything in England? And is a dacoit anything
connected with it? I pass by Sepoys
and Peons, as we know all about them, and
Griffs, I understand, are greenhorns, as yet
uninitiated into the mysteries of India. But
it would be satisfactory to know whether
Baboos are of the same genus, and whether
a comparison is meant to be instituted
between the ape tribe and the newly caught
cadets. Paddy fields, I presume, are fields of
potatoes; but the name must be annoying
to those gallant sons of Erin who happen to
hold the company's commission; and at the
appearance of such words as deen and paigah,
conjecture stands aghast, and despair throws
down the newspaper.

Now and then, however, there is an advantage
in the air of mystery thrown over a
communication by these enigmatical phrases,
and a massacre committed with swords and
bayonets hardly seems so bad as one
perpetrated with tulwars—a doubly diabolical
weapon. But when the English in a station
escape to the cutcherry, it would surely be
desirable to know what sort of a place that
may be, and whether our apprehensions ought
to be increased or allayed by the fact of the
said cutcherry being pukka.

Here comes my dear friend Jones, whose
daughter has been in India scarcely a year,
complaining that he cannot make out her
letters. He knew, of course, that his little
grandson would have an ayah, and so forth;
but he is informed that baby has an almah,
and wants to know if it is a cradle, or a bottle,
or a perambulator, or a hare-lip, or a strawberry
mark. And will not the child's legs
suffer, if, being only six months old, it is
already put into a bandy? I own I am
inclined to advise Jones to be unpaternal enough
to retaliate in a similar strain, and to tell
Mrs. Hukkab that he is going to the polyphloisbeio
thalasses, or, in the slang which
another class of verbal contrabandists are
trying to smuggle into our newspapers, to say
that her last letter was rather nethographic,
and ask if she would like to have a cruphaberna
sent out, or whether her cook uses an
anhydrohepseterion.

HERRICK'S JULIA.

Everyone  who chances to know anything
about either the poet or the painter must
be tolerably familiar, we presume, with
Hogarth's famous imaginary portrait of
Churchill, the satirist. It represents Bruin,
a rather formidable specimen of the great
grizzly bear, hugging (as if he loved it) an
enormous gnarled bludgeon with a brand of
infamy labelled on every knot—such , Lie
Twelve, Lie Fifteen, Fallacy, and so forth
throughout. About his throat a clerical
band—torn, awry, and crumpled. At his
muzzle a foaming measure of porter, over
which he is slobbering in a sort of ursine
rapture very ludicrous to see. Altogether
a monstrous distortion, and yet—tradition
saith—somehow as like to the original as
two peas, in spite of all its fantastic exaggeration
and extravagance.

A companion picture, sketched after a
similar fashion, though conceived in a very
different mood, might, we fancy, be readily
enough drawn in pen and ink—presenting to
view a sort of a Minasi-portraiture of another
demi-semi-reverend. As characteristic a
likeness it might be rendered in its way as
even that terrible one entitled, The Bruiser,
Charles Churchill, in the character of a
Russian Hercules regaling himself after having
killed the Monster Caricatura. Not
certainly, as in that instance, savagely etched in
with the deadly needle of a Hogarth's scorn,
or bit into copper with the aquafortis of his
marvellous genius for ridicule; but lightly
touched off, on the contrary, with the fluent
carelessness of some genial and unpretending
goosequill. The portraiture we mean of a no
less unreverend reverend than jovial Robert
Herrick, vicar for some thirty-four years of
the pleasant little village of Dean Prior,
down in Devonshire. Not a jot of a bruiser,
but a glorious boon companion. No more
appalling club at his elbow than that
furnished, may be, by a shepherd's crook twined
about with ivy, and turned into a kind of
impromptu thyrsus—a rustic mockery, in
fact, of the old classic wand of your true
epicurean. No pewter pot of XXX frothed
up before him; but a flagon of ripe canary
and a bowl of aromatic hippocras. Yet with
his clerical band, too, not only torn, awry,
and crumpled, but, beyond that, fragrantly
and rosily wine-stained! Roystering old
Robin Herrick! there he sits eternally at
table, with his doublet unbuttoned, his
cheek flushed, and his hair disordered;
just as he sat two centuries ago in the
merry days—and nights—of King Charles
the Second; just as any one may still see him
drinking and singing over his cups to this