delight, urged the car along. After a few minutes, it stopped again. An aged minister of the idol then stood up, and, with indecent action, completed this disgusting exhibition. I felt a consciousness of doing wrong in witnessing it. I was appalled at the magnitude and horror of the spectacle. The characteristics of Moloch's worship are obscenity and blood. After the tower had proceeded some way, a pilgrim was ready to offer himself a sacrifice to the idol; he laid himself down in the road, before the tower as it was moving along, on his face, with his arms s'retched forwards: the multitude passed around him, leaving the space clear, and he was crushed to death by the wheels of the tower. A shout of joy was raised to the god. He is said to smile when the libation of blood is made. The people threw money on the body of the victim, in approbation of the deed. He was left to view for some time; and then carried to the Golgotha, where I have just seen him.

"These sacrifices are not confined to Juggernaut. At, Ishera, eight miles from Calcutta, once the residence of Governor Hastings, is a temple of the same idol.

"Juggernaul's Temple, near Ishera on the

Ganges, Rutt Jattra, May, 1807. "The tower here is drawn along, like that at Juggernaut, by cables. The number of worshippers at this festival is computed to be about one hundred thousand. The tower is covered with indecent emblems, which were freshly painted for the occasion, and were the objects of sensual gaze by both sexes. One of the victims of this year was a well made young man, of healthy appearance, and comely aspect. He had a garland of flowers round his neck, and his hair was dishevelled. He danced for a while before the idol, singing in an enthusiastic strain; and then, rushing suddenly on the wheels, he shed his blood under the tower of obscenity. Many of the pilgrims come from remote regions, with their wives and children, travelling slowly in the hottest season of the year; they are sometimes upwards of two months on their journey, Many of the pilgrims die by the way, and their bodies generally remain unburried; so that the road to Juggernaut may be known, for the last fifty miles, by the human bones which are strewed in the

way.

These descriptions are comparatively ancient; but in 1822 we have the following account from Colonel Phipps, of the 13th Bengal Native Infantry:

"The walls of the temple, which are not visible beyond the enclosure, are VOL. VI. X

covered with statues of stone, in attitudes so grossly indecent, that it seems surpris ing how any superstition could debase its votaries to such a degree as to make them introduce into their most sacred places such filthy and obscene figures. The idol Juggernaut, which is so celebrated that pilgrims resort to worship it from the remotest parts of India, is probably the coarsest image in the country. The figure does not extend below the loins; and has no hands; but two stumps in lieu of arms, on which the priests occasionally fastenhands of gold. A Christian is almost led to think that it was an attempt to see how low idolatry could debase the human mind.

"A very large establishment of priests, and others, is attached to the temple. One of the principals stated the number to consist of three thousand families, including four hundred families of cooks to prepare holy food. The provisions furnished daily for the idol, and his attendants, consist of two hundred and twenty pounds of rice, ninety-seven pounds of kuliye (a pulse), twenty-four pounds of moong (a small grain), one hundred and eighty-eight pounds of clarified buffaloe's butter, eighty pounds of molasses, thirty-two pounds of vegetables, ten pounds of sour milk, two pounds and a half of spices, two pounds of sandal-wood, some camphor, twenty pounds of salt, four rupees' worth of fire-wood; and twenty-two pounds of lamp-oil for lights at night. This holy food is presented to the idol three times a day; the gates are shut, and none but a few personal servants are allowed to be present. This meal lasts about an hour, during which period the dancing girls attached to the temple dance in the room with many pillars. On the ringing of a bell, the doors are thrown open, and the food is removed.

"There are, in all, twelve festivals cele brated at Juggernaut, during the year; but by far the most important season is the Rutt Jattra, when the idol is placed in a car, and visits the place where he was originally formed.

"The pilgrims who attend the festival of Chundnun Jattra, and wish to remain for the Rutt Jattra, are termed Lall Jattrees, and pay ten rupees to government; three rupees to the priest who brought them, if they come from the northward, and six if they come from the southward; and three rupees for the priest; this regu lation occasions the receipts to be usually greater at this festival than at any other. Forty-three days after its commencement, the Chund Jattra is celebrated: the idol is brought outside the tower, and placed on an elevated platform within the boundary

wall, but visible from the outside, and is bathed. A great many pilgrims attend this ceremony; and those who wish to remain a fortnight, and see the Ratt Jattra, are termed Neem Lalls. If they come from the northward, they are obliged to pay government five rupees; if from the southward, three rapées; and one ropee eight anas to the Punda who brought them. Two rupees six anas is the tax for five days.

"The loss of life occasioned by this deplorable superstition probably exceeds that of any other. The aged, the weak, the sick, are persuaded to attempt this pilgrimage, as a remedy for all evils. The number of women and children, also, is very great. The pilgrims leave their families, and all their occupations, to travel an immense distance, with the delusive hope of obtaining an eternal bliss. Their means of subsistence on the road are scanty; and their light clothing, and little bodily strength, are ill calculated to encounter the inclemency of the weather. When they reach the district of Cuttack, they cease to experience that hospitality shown elsewhere to pilgrims; it is a burden which the inhabitants could not sustain; and they prefer availing themselves of the increased demand for provisions, to augment the price. This difficulty is more severely felt as they approach the temple; till they find scarcely enough left to pay the tax to the government, and to satisfy the rapacious Brahmins.

"When it was decided that a tax should be levied from the pilgrims, every precaution was taken to make it yield as much as possible. Alterations were made in the regulations, from time to time. One of the principal was the mode of reward ing the Purharees and Pundas; who have a great number of subordinate agents, who travel about in search of pilgrims, and bring them in companies to Juggernaut.

"The government, at first, authorized these people to collect, at the barriers, a fee from the pilgrims, for their own bene fit; but afterwards, it was resolved, that the British collector should levy, besides the tax for the state, an additional one; the amount of which he subsequently paid over to the Purharees and Pundas, in such proportions as they were entitled to, from the number of pilgrims which each had succeeded in enticing to undertake the pilgrimage.

"Under the present arrangement, the English government collects a fund for the special purpose of securing to the attendants of the temple so high a premium, as to stimulate their cupidity to send agents all over India to delude the ignorant and superstitious Hindoos to under

take a pilgrimage which is attended with greater loss of life than any other superstition in India, and which annually involves in ruin a great many families. This is more extraordinary, as the president of the Board of Controul, in his correspondence with the Court of Directors, argues that the tax cannot be considered as introducing or tolerating the practice of idolatry. The truth is, that the priests of the temple would not take much pains to collect pilgrims, if they were not secure of a large pecuniary benefit; and the Hindoos would not undertake long and dangerous journeys, attended with great personal inconvenience, unless their enthusiasm was strongly excited by the priests.

"At present the temple has all the outward appearance of being under the immediate control and superintendance of British authorities. The regular troops guard the barriers; and are placed on dnty at the very gates of the temple. The endowed lands for its support are in the immediate possession of government. The expences of the temple are fixed by the same authority. The cars of the idols are decorated with English woollens from the Company's stores; and, at their expence, a tax is regularly levied from the pilgrims: and an additional one, of one-fifth of the other, is raised for rewarding the Purharees and Pundas. In the year 1822, these people were understood to have received from the British collector, forty thousand rupees. One of the principal natives, in order to show the good policy of securing so large a sum for the Brair mins, related, that a Purharee, named Juddo Tewarree, had, in the year 1821, detached one hundred agents, to entice pilgrims; and had, the ensuing year, received the premium for four thousand persons he was at that time busily employed in instructing one hundred additional agents in all the mysteries of this trade, with the intention of sending them into the upper provinces of Bengal. The attendants of the idol are fond of boasting of the efficient support which they receive from rulers whose own religion teaches them to abhor idolatry. They say that under the Mahratta government, when a Hindoo determined to undertake a pik grimage to Juggernaut, his family commended him to the protection of God, with little expectation of ever seeing him again; but that now, under the British government, every encouragement is held ont, and every exertion made, to revive the popularity and sanctity of the place.”

Thus far as respects Juggernaut. There are many other temples in India from which the East India Company receives

tribute, of which the principal are Gya,
Allahabad, and Tripetty. The total
amount received from all these sources
is unknown; but that supplied from the
temples already enumerated, amounts to a
prodigious sum. Mr. Poynder estimates
it as follows:-
---

Clear profit for the seven-
teen years ending in
1829, inclusively, for
Juggernaut
Clear profit for the sixteen
years ending in 1829 in-
clusively, for Gya

Clear profit for the sixteen
years ending in 1829 in-

99,205 15 0

Clear profit for the seventeen years ending in 1829 inclusively, for Tripetty

Total tribute received from

idolatrous worshippers for seventeen years 920,215 15 9 This tribute, as the reader may have been informed in the course of reading the above extracts, is paid by the pilgrims who crowd at certain periods of the year from all parts of India to attend the Hindoo festivals, The amount here specified is only a small portion of the actual sums levied on the wretched votaries of superstition, the difference between these gross sums and net produce, being expended by the company in contriving facilities and in getting up allurements of all sorts to entice the gross savages of Hindostan to frequent the temples, and therefore to become liable to the tax. The Company, therefore, take the greatest pains to make and repair the roads and ways which lead to these seats of obscenity and abomination. They employ whippers in, who scour the country, and use every sort of influence on the half animated natives, to make a journey to the nearest or the most popular temple. That no disappointment should ensue, but that each pilgrim, on his return home after his visit to one of those, should have something to communicate to his kindred worthy of being treasured up in the family traditions, and calculated to promote future pilgrimages, the Company provides that the idol and his satellites shall be duly provided with an ample and picturesque costume. The ta ble of the idol is furnished forth by the Company. The dress, or wearing apparel of the idol, is expressly provided by the Company, and is composed of the very best English broad cloth. The horses and elephants, and their caparisons, are ordered and superintended by a servant of

The reader is not to allow himself to imagine that the East India Company, of whose operations he has been all this time reading, is the Company of a hundred years ago. No, it is the Company com posed of his own cotemporaries; they are men to be met with in the open day in the streets of this civilized metropolis; and they form no small portion of the civil, aye, and the religious community too, of this country, which shares in and acknow ledges the blessings of a free government and a divine faith. To attempt to set up any justification for the policy of the Company in their patronage of Juggernaut and his dreadful orgies; even to strive to excuse their conduct, would be only a mockery of the common understandings of mankind. We have never seen a serious apology tendered on their behalf, to mitigate the odium which their unwarrantable encouragement of brutal idolatry has so generally excited; and we confess that our imagination is unable to conjure up the shadow of a pretence which would be of the slightest avail to their defence.

It has been said, in extenuation of the East India Company, in fostering the corruptions of Juggernaut, that the Hindoo population, which this body is called on to govern, are inalienably wedded to their system of worship; and that the conqueror is bound by reason and good faith to respect that worship, and if he disturb it, he not only violates his pledges, but he weakens, or, perhaps, destroys, the tenure of his sway. We concur, to the fullest extent, in this doctrine. But the East India Company go farther. They not

only forbear from disturbing, but they positively interfere to facilitate and to encourage the practices of the Hindoo religion. We have seen of what character those practices are. No one can pretend to think of them except as crimes against the moral nature of mán; as delinquencies which human beings could never dream of perpetrating in the name of religion, if their common instincts had not been completely extinguished. If the Company had been mere passive speetators of the enormities thus habitually com mitted in this territory, we certainly should not approve of their neutrality, we should say that they were indispensably bound to take such overt measures for the suppression, or at least the restriction, of so fon a system, as would not endanger the object itself which these measures had in view. But unfortunately the case is not so favourable to them. They are, to all intents and purposes, the fast friends of Hindooism; it is the church which they liberally support, and which they avowedly maintain.

LAST ILLNESS AND DEATH OF

BYRON.

THE following interesting extracts, relative to the last iHness and death of Lord Byron, are taken from Mr. Millingen's new work on Greece, &c. Mr. Millingen was professionally attendant on Lord Byron, and therefore must be heard with attention:

"The cup of health had dropped from his lips, and constant anxiety and suffering operated powerfully on his mind, already a prey to melancholy apprehensions, and disappointment, increased by disgust. Continually haunted by a dread of epilepsy or palsy-complaints most humiliat ing to human pride-he fell into the low-est state of hypochondriasis, and vented his sorrows in language which, though sometimes sublime, was at others as peevish and capricions, as that of an unruly and quarrelsome child. When he returned to himself, however, he would request us not to take the indisposed and sickly fit for the sound man.'

"Riding was the only occupation that procured him any relief; and even this was but momentary."

Mr. Finlay and Mr. Millingen called on Lord Byron in the evening:

"We found him lying on a sofa, complaining of a slight fever, and of pains in

the articulation. He was at first more gay than usual; but, on a sudden, he became pensive, and after remaining some few minutes in silence, he said that during the whole day he had reflected a great deal on a prediction, which had been made to him, when a boy, by a famed fortune-teller in Scotland. His mother, who firmly believed in necromancy and astrology, had sent for this person, and desired him to inform her what would be the future destiny of her son. Having examined attentively the palm of his hand, the man looked at him for a while steadfastly, and then with a solemn voice exclaimed, Beware of your thirty-seventh year, my young lord, beware.'

"To say the truth,' observed his lordship, "I find it equally difficult to know what to believe in this world, and what not to believe. There are as many plausible reasons for inducing me to die a bigot, as there have been to make me hitherto live a freethinker. You will, I know, ridicule my belief in lucky and unlucky days; but no consideration can now induce me to undertake any thing either on a Friday or a Sunday. I am positive it would terminate unfortunately. Every one of my misfortunes, and, God knows, have had my share, have happened to me on one of those days. You will ridicule, -also, a beliet' in incorporeal beings. With out instancing to your the men of profound genius who have acknowledged their existence, I could give you the details of my friend Shelley's conversations with his familiar. Did he not apprise me, that he had been informed by that familiar, that he would end his life by drowning; and did I not, a short time after, perform, on the sea-beach, his funeral rites ?'"

It was not till the 15th that Mr. Millingen was called in to attend his lordship professionally. Most of the melancholy particulars of bis death are already known to the public; we shall therefore weave together such only as seem to us most iuteresting and novel :

"The next morning (17th) the bleeding was repeated; for although the rheumatic symptoms had completely disappeared, the cerebral ones were hourly increasing, and this continuing all day, we opened the vein, for the third time, in the afternoon. Cold applications were from the beginning constantly kept on the head; blisters were also proposed. When on the point of applying them, Lord Byron asked me whether it would answer the same purpose to apply both on the same leg. Guessing the motive that led him to ask this question, I told him I would place them above, the knees, on the inside of

the thighs. Do so,' said he, for as long as I live, I will not allow any one to see my lame foot.'"

There have been strong suspicions, that, under proper treatment, his lordship's life might have been saved: it is consolatory, therefore, to hear Mr. Millingen conclude as follows:

:

"The more I consider this difficult question, however, the more I feel convinced, that whatsoever method of cure had been adopted, there is every reason to believe that a fatal termination was inevitable; and here I may be permitted to observe, that it must have been the lot of every medical man to observe how frequently the fear of death produces it, and low seldom a patient, who persuades himself that he must die, is mistaken. The prediction of the Scotch fortune-teller was ever present to Lord Byron; and, like an insidious poison, destroyed that moral energy, which is so useful to keep up the patient in dangerous complaints. Did I not tell you,' said he repeatedly to me, that I should die at thirty-seven?' During his lordship's illness, his spirits seem to have been greatly depressed :"During the last days of Lord Byron's illness, he was remarkably taciturn; but his mind was occupied by anxious thoughts. He had made his will before his departure from Genoa; the only legacy which he made during his illness was to Lucca, to whom he gave the receipt by which the Mesolonghiots engaged themselves to pay, on the arrival of the loan, the two thousand dollars which had been lent them by Lord Byron, to enable them to pay the arrears of the discontented Suliots. He recommended Lucca to send this sum to his mother a paralytic widow, who had fled from Patras to Ithaca with her daughters and son. Lord Byron, hearing of their miseries, had, on his visit to that island, taken the whole family under his protection. In respect to his servants, he informed them, that he had recommended them all to his executors.

"I was not a little surprised to hear him ask me on the 15th, whether I could not do him the favour of inquiring in the town for any very old and ugly witch? As I turned his question in derision, he repeated to me, with a serious air, Never mind whether I am superstitious or not; bat 1 again entreat of you to bring me the most celebrated one there is, in order that she may examine whether this sudden -loss of my health does not depend on the .evil eye. She may devise some means to dissolve the spell.'

66

Knowing the necessity of indulging a patient in his harmless caprices, I soon

patient

It

procured one, who answered exactly to his description. But the following day, seeing that he did not mention the subject, I avoided recalling it to his memory. is in the Levant an almost universal practice, as soon as a person falls ill, to have recourse, in the first instance, to one of these professed exorcisers. If their art does not succeed in restoring the patient to health, by destroying the power of fascination, then the medical man is called in. But without this previous preparation, none of his medicines are supposed to be capable of curing the complaint.

66

Two thoughts constantly occupied his mind. Ada and Greece were the names he hourly repeated. The broken com plaints he uttered, lamenting to die a stranger to the sole daughter of his affection, not only far from her embrace, but perhaps the object of the hatred, which he thought had been carefully instilled into her from her tenderest infancy, showed how exquisitely his parental feelings were excited by these sad considerations. The glory of dying in Greece, and for Greece, was the only theme he could fly to for relief, and which would dry up the tears he abundantly shed, when pronouncing Ada's name. In the agony of death-that dreadful hour when, leaving the confines of life, the soul is launched into eternity-his parting look, his last adien, was to Greece and Ada. I was present when, after taking the first antispasmodic mixture, he spoke to Fletcher for the last time, recommending him to call on his sister, on Lady Byron and his daughter, and deliver to each the messages, which he had repeated to him before. His feelings, and the clouds of death, which were fast obscuring his intellect, did not allow him to continue: 'You know what you must say to Ada-I have already told it you-you know it, do you not?' On hearing Fletcher's affirmative, he replied, that's right!'

On the 18th he addressed me, saying: "Your efforts to preserve my life will be vain. Die I must: I feel it. Its loss I do not lament; for to terminate my wearisome existence I came to Greece. My wealth, my abilities, I devoted to her cause. Well there is my life to her. One request let me make to you. Let not my body be hacked, or be sent to England. Here let my bones moulder. Lay me in the first corner without pomp or nonsense,'

: