He had held a commission in the army of the first Napoleon, in which Ventura was a serjeant. These two had entered the Punjab together, through Persia, but we do not know whether they had travelled in company the whole distance from Europe. It is stated that they were reduced to such extremities before they reached India, that they were compelled to earn their bread in Persia, or elsewhere on their way, by sweeping a mosque. For whatever reason, Allard never exercised any civil functions, but Ventura was for some time the administrator of the Rechaab Doab, having his headquarters at Vuzerabad on the Chenab river. We never heard either good or evil of him in his civil capacity. His widow, pleading destitution, applied for and received, a few years ago, a small pension from the Government of India. He died, we believe, in France. Allard never left the Punjâb, and was buried at Lahore, or in its immediate neighbourhood. Court seems to have been a mere drill-serjeant.

But Avitabile, the fourth man, a Neapolitan by birth, left his mark, in characters of blood, upon the district that he ruled. He had charge of the frontier, and resided at Peshawur, where he exercised full civil as well as military power. This trans-Indus territory had been conquered by the Sikhs from the Affghans; the population was mainly Mahommedan, and therefore impatient of infidel rule; and the mountaineers beyond the border were even more fierce and lawless than the inhabitants of Peshawur and its immediate neighbourhood-which it was not very easy to be. Life was held at a very cheap rate, and to rule such a population was a task of great danger as well as difficulty. By all accounts Avitabile was completely master of the situation. A very vivid picture of his character and administration is briefly sketched in a work of fiction, called The Adventures in the Punjab,' written forty years ago, when he still governed the border Province, by the late deeply-lamented Sir Henry Lawrence. He says:

'The most lenient view that can be taken of General Avitabile is, to consider him as set in authority over savage animals-not as a ruler over reasonable beings-grinding down a race who bear the yoke with about as good a grace as a wild bull in a net, and who, catching their rulers for one moment asleep, would soon cease to be governed. But it is to his disgrace that he acts as a savage among savage men, instead of showing them that a Christian can wield the iron sceptre without staining it by needless cruelty or personal vice; without following some of the worst fashions of his worst neighbours. General Avitabile has added summary hangings to the native catalogue of punishments, and not a bad one either, when properly used; but the ostentation of adding two or three to the string suspended from his gibbets, on special days and festivals, added to a very evident habitual

carelessness of life, leads one to fear that small pains are taken to distinguish between innocence and guilt; and that many a man, ignorant of the alleged crime, pays with his life the price of blood. For it is the General's system, when, as often happens, a Sikh, or any other of his own men, disappears at or near any village in the Peshawur territory, to fine that village, or to make it give up the murderer or murderess. The latter is the cheapest plan; a victim or victims are given up, and justice is satisfied.

'Still General Avitabile has many of the attributes of a good ruler; he is bold, active, and intelligent, seeing everything with his own eyes, up early and late; he has, at the expense of his own character for humanity, by the terrors of his name, saved much life. Believed to fear neither man nor devil, he keeps down, by grim fear, what nothing else would keep down, the unruly spirits around him, who, if let slip, would riot in carnage. His severity may therefore be extenuated as the least of two evils; but no such palliation can be offered for gross sensuality and indecency, tending to degrade the very name of Christian in the sight of, perhaps, the very worst specimens of God's creatures among whom he dwells. Avitabile's whole system of morals is oriental, avowedly eschewing force, when artifice can gain the point, and looking on subjects as made to be squeezed. In person he is tall and stout, with bushy beard, whiskers and moustache, marked with the smallpox, and with a coarse and unprepossessing countenance, exhibiting at times the worst passions of man, but again lighted up into even a pleasing expression; of no education, but with strong natural sense and ability, he has acquired a good knowledge of Persian and of the Panjabi dialect. Strangely influencing those around him, and influenced by them, his history is a curious study, and when his own generation has passed away, will hardly be believed.'

We were well aware, before we read this statement, that Avitabile ruled the Province with a rod of iron, and that he succeeded in cowing the wild tribes on both sides of the border by the promptitude of his measures of repression, and the unsparing severity with which he administered punishment. But we confess that all which we had heard of the unscrupulous and sanguinary character of the measures that he pursued to inspire terror falls far short of the truth as recently made known to us. We have now before us a photographed facsimile of a Persian sunud or grant issued by Avitabile in the following terms:

'By the grace of Seal.

the Immortal Being.

Ameer ud Seal.

Dowlah Dilawar Jung

Chevalier General Avitabile, Sahib Bahadur.

'At this time, the villages of Kari-Chandari and Shamshu have been granted in Jägir to Kumer-ud-deen Khan, leader of Mussulman Cavalry of Peshawur, from 1st Asin 1897, on the following condition of service:-That each year he cut off and bring before the Sahib Bahadur the heads of fifty Afridi men. The revenue of the said villages is to be enjoyed by him from the Kharif crop of the year stated for his maintenance, and everyone is strictly forbidden to interfere with his possession. This order is to be carried out. Whatever number of

heads may, within the year, fall short of the prescribed number, a deduction of fifty rupees is to be made for each head by way of fine from the aforesaid individual. At his request, a grant of this Jäger has been made in writing, with the two stipulations cited. 'Given at Peshawur on 4th Magh, 1897.'

No comment that we could offer upon this document could come up to its naked atrocity. We are not without misgivings, however, that the British Government has erred in the opposite extreme, by attempting to repress the outrages of tribes so fierce and reckless as those who ply their trade of rapine and bloodshed upon that wild border, by gentle means. In such a case, the stern and unsparing administration of retributive justice is the truest humanity.

To return to the state of things which we have briefly described the feebleness of the Sikh forces at one period, and their extraordinary prowess at another, ought to convey an important moral for our reflection and guidance. In the case of the Sikh soldiery we see exhibited the two extremes of the utter want, and of a high degree of discipline. The men whom it cost Thomas and Perron so little trouble to defeat with troops of no very high quality, were every whit as personally brave as those who maintained such a desperate and for a long time almost equal conflict against English soldiers at Sobraon and Chillianwalla. There was but the one difference between the Sikhs of the two eras.

Yet the vast importance of this difference is altogether ignored by those who talk and write as if soldiers fit to cope with troops, whether English or native, led and disciplined by British officers, could be raised up on the spur of the moment, like the armed men who sprang of old from the dragon's teeth, to wrest from us the empire of India. They are well aware how essential discipline is to the efficiency of our own troops, but they seem to think that those troops might be defeated unless they were very strong in numbers, and our power thereby placed in jeopardy, by the wild tribes of the jungles, by Ryots from the ploughtail, or by the rabble of the great cities of India, converted into soldiers at the shortest possible notice. No doubt our army in India bears a very low numerical proportion to the population. No doubt there are

peoples within its limits who at different times and under favourable circumstances, such as the drills of De Boigne and Perron, have been trained into fair soldiers. But we must bear in mind with whom they had to fight-men in some cases less brave, and in others with far less discipline, than themselves. Since Clive routed thousands at Plassy with the merest handful of good soldiers, down to the present day, the people of India, other than men trained (like the troops that faced Lord Lake at Laswaree, or those who gave Lord Gough so much trouble at Sobraon,) to rely each on his right and left hand comrades, to stand steady under fire, and to change their ground without breaking their ranks or falling into confusion, have never caused us the least serious anxiety. The history of the European adventurers in India demonstrates that even with their assistance the native forces have never been able to resist the firm ascendency of the British Government, and without it they were altogether powerless. Yet circumstances were in those days much more favourable to the growth of independent military power among the native states. No such European adventurers, and no such armies as they once raised and commanded, could now arise in India; and the dangers which formerly threatened from that quarter may be said to have disappeared altogether.

ART. IV.-1. A Treatise on the Game Laws of England and Wales. By JOHN LOCKE, Esq., M.P., Q.C. 5th edition. London: 1866.

2. Laws in Force in the Colonies as to Trespass and also as to the Preservation of Game. Presented to both Houses of Parliament by command of Her Majesty. 1871.

3. Reports from Her Majesty's Representatives Abroad on the Laws and Regulations relative to the Protection of Game and to Trespass (I. and II.). Presented to both Houses of Parliament by command of Her Majesty. 1871.

4. A Bill for the Abolition of the Game Laws. 1870 and 1871. THE

HE traveller who takes a road leading from the little town of Alton, on the Guildford branch of the South-Western Railway, to a village called Liss, not far from Petersfield and on the direct Portsmouth, will pass through a pretty hamlet nestled under the northern face of a prominent chalk cliff or hanger. It has no remarkable features, except a clear perennial stream called the Well-head, and a vast old yew tree in

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the churchyard. In that churchyard, however, lie the remains of a man who has made the village famous, and whose one small volume has had much to do towards bringing out one of our most distinguishing national characteristics, the love of natural scenery combined with that of natural history and sport. White's Selborne has been the delight of successive crops of school-boys for the last eighty years, and has, perhaps, by itself and by quotations from its pages, done more than any other book to stimulate amongst us those tendencies which form the civilised development of the hunting instinct. Dame Juliana Berners is now chiefly remembered by citations, like Max Müller's, illustrative of the history of language. Sir Roger de Coverley's pack of hariers is charming, although, after all, the Spectator' only gives us an account of one day's sport. But the old naturalist, who could not be persuaded to change the home of his youth for the best living which Oriel had to bestow, delights us by the variety of his experience not less than by the pellucid clearness of his English.

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This love of the country and of country pursuits for their own sakes often includes within it a love of sport also for its own sake, but we doubt much whether Mr. Rogers' gibe at English tastes, It's a fine morning, let's go and kill some'thing,' often or ever gives a correct view of the case. of the 54,203 sportsmen who took out licences in the year 1869, we suspect that very few were inspired by the mere desire to slay; in most the love of fresh air and exercise, and as regards the Scottish contingent, the love of scenery, had much to do with the matter, and many would rather part with the grouse and black-cock than with the view of the hills where the grouse and black-cock dwell.

These feelings, to philosophers like the honourable Member for Leicester, are no doubt very contemptible; but, until Mr. Taylor succeeds in altering the inmost nature of his countrymen, these feelings will continue to bear sway. Nor are they confined to that aristocracy which he so cordially detests. The tired merchant, the overworked professional man, each enjoys them in various proportions during his autumnal holiday; and if all have not the same love of scenery, yet the beaters who scramble through our coverts, the shepherds and gillies who drive our hills, the very children who act as 'stops when the squire shoots his pheasants, join with their betters in various ways, but with much of the same keenness in their love of sport.

Still, this is but one side of the picture. A poacher in a condemned cell awaiting execution for the murder of a game