1814.] Campe's German Dictionary, &c. remarked in a recent publication, that "the barbarous and pedantic practice of borrowing from foreign languages, which brands the Germans with disgrace in the eyes of all civilized nations, ought not only to be written but thundered against, from all points of our literature; for the language is the ground-work on which the existence, perpetuity, and improvement of the nation are founded." Kolbe, though he received a French education in Berlin, and is equally conversant in both languages, nevertheless carries his point with a high hand and with a strong predeliction for the models of ancient classic literature. It must give every true patriot sincere satisfaction to remark in the late orders of the day and reports of the achievements of the allies, a laudable desire to address Germans in their native language, both in words and idiom, and this alone is a victory for the good cause. We may now not only listen with pleasure to the indefatigable Campe of Brunswick, but bestow due commendation on his solicitude to free our copious language from all foreign alloy, and to bring its own genuine coinage into general circulation. At the risk of all he was worth he finished in 1811, with the fifth volume, his Great Dictionary of the German Language. Adelung had in his Lexicon 55,181 articles and words; Campe musters 141,277. This Dictionary of Campe's, in five thick quarto volumes, must nevertheless be admitted to be very incomplete. Radloff of Munich, who has just published an important work On the Language of France, and the intellectual Tyranny exercised by that Nation over the rest of Europe since the Peace of Rastadt in 1714, has been long engaged upon a dictionary, by which Campe's would be greatly improved. So has likewise the celebrated John Henry Voss, now resident at Heidelberg, to whom our language is so highly indebted as a poet and translator of the Greeks and Romans. The result of their labours has not yet appeared. So much however is certain, that the French language contains not more than 24,000 words; whereas the German, if the treasures of all its different dialects were thoroughly explored, would be found to comprehend not fewer than 500,000. Meanwhile Campe is to Germany what Johnson has long been to Britain. His Dictionary, to which he sacrificed 50,000 rix-dollars, at a very inauspicious period, will remain a monument of German industry, a source of mani 27 fold information and will prove beneficial even from the contradiction which it produces. Individual efforts to purify a language, are, however, capable of effecting but little. What a wretched medley is spoken by most of our older courtiers, and in our boarding-schools into which the French leaven has been so copiously introduced? In what manner do even men of business of the first class at Leipzig and Dresden, where the German language is allowed to be spoken in its greatest purity, express themselves in their mother tongue! How worthy of imitation on the other hand, is the palitic solicitude of the French to fix the standard of their language? On the foundation of the Berlin academy in 1700, the great Leibnitz projected a plan which would not have been attended with much expense, for establishing a distinct academy for the German language. How would that scholar, animated as he was by a truly patriotic spirit, have been astonished, could he have known that a German academy would actually crown a prize essay written in French, on a question proposed by it, respecting the causes which have made the French the universal language of Europe. On this occasion the Abbé Rivarol, in his treatise on the universality of the French language, to which he prefixed this motto:--Tu regere eloquio populos, o Galle memento, emphatically observes:-Le temps semble être venu de dire le monde français, comme autrefois le monde romain. At present it behoves us above all things to adopt the most efficient measures against the systematic intrusion of the French language. The question once proposed by Bouhours: Si les Allemands pouvaient avoir de l'esprit ? has been thrown in our teeth in every piece of criticism, from the pen of a Geoffroy and his colleagues in the Journal de l'Empire, and the Mercure de France down to the present day. Let us, however, pursue the principle inculcated by our immortal Klopstock, and “not be too just toward foreign slander!" REFLEXIONS on the CONVERSION of the NATIVES of INDIA to CHRISTIANITY.. "Jupiter est quodcunque vides quocunque 17 moveris. To the Editor of the New Monthly Magazine. HAVING observed that Dr. Middleton and three other reverend clergymen, have been confirmed by H. R. H. the On the Conversion of the Natives of India to Christianity. [Aug. 1, Prince Regent, as bishop and archdea- I have understood that he had not vencons of the Hon. East India Company's Oriental Empire; and having a personal knowledge of the bishop and one of the archdeacon's being well qualified by their virtues and learning for those most important offices, as far as gentlemen ignorant of the eastern lauguages, customs, and manuers can be considered as so qualified, I may offer some comments I drew up on this subject, during the period of last year's discussion of the act of parliament. Having passed twenty years of the best part of my life in the Company's service at Bengal, and had much and intimate intercourse with the better class of natives, to which the practice of a popular profession, and a knowledge of their languages introduced me, I esteem myself competent to offer an opinion on this important national subject; and while with every person versed in EastIndia matters I deprecate the interference of ignorant missionaries with the religious tenets, laws, and customs of our fellow subjects in India, whether Hindoos or Mussulmans, I think some good may be done, and respectable converts made in time by the pious and moral examples of a regular Church of England establishment: but, like the other servants of the Company, the clergy ought as early as at their entrance into the university to be educated for this special service, and have nothing to Occupy their thoughts or time but their spiritual duties. Within six months of his arrival in that country, a writer or cadet on the Bengal Establishment is so perfect a master of the Hindustany language, (which I may say I have conversed in with the natives of Cabul and Cashmire to the west and north, of Ceylon and Sumatra to the north and east, and of every intervening province to an extent of 3000 or 4000 miles.) that he would be ashamed of having a native in his service, who could speak English, or of using an interpreter upon any occasion afterwards. No European ever had a more scholarlike and critical knowledge of the Oriental languages than the late Sir William Jones; but he proceeded to Bengal at too late a period of life, in his 36th year; and in 1787, when he had resided there near four years, I was surprised, while often dining at his table, to hear him ask for every thing he wanted, through a native who answered him, in English: and though I never saw him afterwards, tured, during a residence of eleven years, to converse with the natives in Hindustany. This memorable example ought particularly to satisfy us, that a clergyman should prepare himself for being useful in those high offices by an appropriate education in this country; that he should proceed to India while yet young enough to be able to overcome those prejudices which every sensible and candid man, who has visited that country after a certain period of life, has ever been ready to acknowledge, and found it ultimately necessary to divest himself of; and that he should acquire such a speaking, as well as book knowledge of the languages, particularly the Persian and Hisdustany, as to be capable of understanding and reading them with fluency; that he should be of course well founded in every sort of college learning, sensible, sober, discreet, and even-tempered; and that he should marry the church in that country as a man marries his wife, for better or worse, and not permit any thought of promotion, change of climate, or other worldly reason to occupy his mind with returning to Europe; imitating in this that great and good man, Sir William Jones, who, being expected to solicit for the Chief Judge-ship at Calcutta when vacant, said, a conscientious judge or bishop could never admit of promotion or translation, but that his first appointment should be final. satisfied, that if respectable and dignified clergymen could thus divert their attention from all temporal concerns, and work upon the minds of the natives of India only by the pious examples of good and holy lives, and a simple, regular, and constant discharge of their clerical duties, they might gather an audience, first perhaps from curiosity, and afterwards through choice; recollecting withal, that the reading part of the community of India is more numerous in proportion to the general population, more learned in the tenets of their respective faiths, and better skilled in the maxims of morality, and more pious and sober, temperate and industrious, submissive and obedient than any other subjects of the most polished and civilized nations in the world. What art did we in Europe not learn from the natives of Asia,-and what branch of science have we not improved in by copying so freely of late from our fellow-subjects in the East? Did not Joseph Lancaster teach us to practise that new system of education I am 1814.3 Misrepresentations of the Character of the Hindoos. which Dr. Bell brought us from Madras? But when shall we improve our two staple manufactures of woollen cloths and cottons, so as to approach the shawls of Cashmire and the muslins of Bengal, and twenty other branches of the arts, in which they still equally excel us? With our refined fellow-subjects in India, much may be done in converting them to Christianity by silent and pious example; but if what many recommend, we even attempt to persuade, we shall soon begin to persecute, and make those fanatics, who by proper management at present are luke-warn to what they would then be zealous in opposing. But I must deprecate that total want of Christian charity and philosophic caudour, that has been active among us of late, in concealing what was good and repeating only what was evil of them. Men are good by comparison; a comparative goodness is consistent with much evil. One dignified divine (and his aim in what he did, has been sadly disappointed in not being nominated to this new oriental see) has given us shuddering details of the "fatal "superstitions, horrible rites, and degrading immoralities, that prevail a "mong the Mussulmans and Hindoos of "India" and by ignorantly including with them, under the general name of Indians, the savages of North America, the Cannibals of the Caribbce and South Sea Islands, and the Hottentots and Caffres of Africa, &c. and has made George Burder secretary of the Missionary Society, and the secretaries of other self-created societies, eloquent in the repetition of similar absurdities. The doctor, I trust, believed what he preached and wrote; but by such garbled quotations, he might with equal propriety make blasphemy out of many parts of our scriptures. When he stated that the Hindoo women still sacrificed their hves on the funeral piles of their husbands, he should have added, had he had any decent regard for truth, that fewer instances of such victims now occur throughout all India, than many of ourselves can recollect of wives in England being burnt at the stake for the murder of their husbands, and for coining; that the Hindoo custom never was a law, but only connived at to check the horrible, (and in all countries too common) crime of husbandicide, and to insure paradise to the voluntary victim: for I insist that the practice is both voluntary and rare; whereas, the wife 29 with us suffers a cruel death, and is besides damned to all eternity! If they were to judge of the English nation by the cruelty of our public exe cutions, more in number than those of all the other kingdoms of the world put together: and by the murders and executions that are represented on our stage, foreigners would consider us as a barbarous and sanguinary people. The old mode of being broken on a wheel, limb after limb, was brutal; and the pleasure a Parisian mob expressed at the dexterity of the executioner, savage in the extreme; yet the coup de grace in a few minutes concluded this disgusting scene, and the last shriek of the culprit was lost in the applauding murmur of the surrounding crowd: but the sight of seven Englishmen, such as we lately witnessed, two or three of them gentlemen, who had been the respectable fathers of families, suspended for an hour like dogs on a gallows, and writhing in the agonies of tortured convulsion, was inhuman and shocking! If this description harrows up their feelings, let those humane missionaries moreover read the sentence of the law, as passed by the judge of the present day on a criminal convicted in England of treason and some sorts of felony; "that he is to be dragged at a horse's tail from his prison to the gallows, to be hung up by the neck, but cut down while yet alive, and his heart torn from his breast, and burnt before his eyes: his head then separated and body quartered and distributed to be exposed on spikes over the gates of the four chief cities of the kingdom," and let them recollect, that the more or less rigid mode of executing this bloody sentence often rested in part with the humane mau the executioner, and that it was carried literally into effect, in the case of Gen. Harrison, who, after the commission of the crime, for which he suffered, executed with prudence and ability the office of one of the Four Viceroys of England, under the Republican Parliament, and conscientiously resigned it under Cromwell's usurpation; and that this great, and, I will say, dignified character, fought a battle royal with the executioner after he was cut down to have his heart cut out, and which part of the sentence that savage wretch chose to indict with severity upon him. An example like this is applicable to the present times; yet I am convinced that Lewis the Good will be merciful in power, and not drown the last speeches 30 Cruelty of certain European Punishments and Amusements. [Aug. 1, of the murderers of his benign brother, as the Paris canaille did that of the lat ter on the 10th of Jan. 1793, in imitation of what had been done in England to Sir Harry Vane, in the days of our gay Charles the Second. Not twenty years ago when the East India Company took upon itself that badge of sovereignty, the administration of criminal justice in Bengal; it copied this severity of the English law, till the natives, horror-struck at more executions taking place after each half-yearly assize in many districts, than the oldest inhabitants had heard of throughout the whole country during their long lives, soon entertained only one sentiment on the subject; and government found it necessary to relax in this bloody severity. Many of the penances, to which the Hindoo devotees subject themselves, and which Doctor Buchanan and his fanatical coadjutors have, with much theatrical address, been cloquent in detailing, are horrible enough in all conscience; and had those missionaries been permitted to penetrate so far into the country, they might have witnessed at Benares a brother bigot, who had for many years enjoyed a superstitious pleasure in laying at his length on a bed formed out of the points of iron spikes; and all the relief he sought in this painful attitude was that of turning himself every six hours from one side to the other. Another had raised his arms extended above his head with both hands clasped, till all the joints had become ossified, and the nails grown through the palm of the opposite band. A painting of this subject by Zoffani, and another of the Lucknow Cockpit, in which I could have recognized good portraits of many of my oldest and dearest friends, are not included among those of that celebrated artist, now exhibiting at the British Institution. Among other English amusements, let me notice those of cock-fighting, bullbaiting, and boxing; of the last of which I was prevailed upon lately to witness a horrible instance, where one of the pugilists was assisted to stand up and claim the victory, with his lower jaw and collar-bone broken, and one eye hanging down on his cheek; while his antagonist, in making his last desperate push at him, fell and dislocated his neck; and during the attempt of his bottle-holder to reduce it, he made as quick an exit as a bullock does under the hand of such a spinal marrow-sticking butcher, as the humane society for slaughtering cattle is in the habit of patronising. But if the Doctor will refer to what as a divine he is no doubt well versed in, the legends of many Christian saints, whose names are still repeated with much veneration in the Roman Catholic calendar, he will find the instances of St. George of England, and other national patrons, more harrowing, if possible, than those of India, to the present feelings of Protestant Europe. Now that a respectable church establishment is going out, cathedrals should be built at Calcutta, Madras, and Bombay, and decent churches at all the chief civil and military stations, ample materials for the cheap construction of which are to be found all ready fitted to our hands in so many deserted mosques and other magnificent buildings; one of which is to be seen standing amidst a dreary wilderness, a solitary monument of the former populousness and grandeur of the place. In such respectable structures the church service and homilies should be read twice every Sunday and once every week day; and every Wednesday and Friday the morning and evening service and a homily, all in the Persian language, first, however, getting a special committee of our ablest English Persian scholars, assisted by some liberal minded Moonshees, to translate those services and a certain number of homilies, and appropriate chapters of the Old and New Testament, for the proper days, into classical language and none other should be read, no words uttered, but what are sanctioned by such a special authority. We should recollect that, next to our holy and revealed writ, the language of the Mussulman Koran and Hindoo Shastars is more elegant, and passages of them are more sublime, than any other books, and that nothing has disgusted the natives more, with our present translations of the scriptures, than the slovenly language into which they have heretofore beca rendered. For, in contradiction to Dr. Buchanan, I must insist, that it requires a profound knowledge of the ori-ental languages to superintend translations into them, and particularly on theological subjects. Trinity in unity, incarnation of the Son of God, atonement by his blood, and justification by faith, are material doctrines of the gospel; and great precision of language is required well and clearly to communicate the metaphysical and moral meanings of those abstract doctrines; particularly into the Hindustany, which not only admits a 1814.] Means recommended for converting the Mahommedans. and nouns. dual number, but a feminine as well as masculine termination, throughout the conjugation and declension of its verbs As a proof of the nicety of their language, they tell us that a schoolmaster was jostled by soine market women on his way to the mosque to say his prayers; and having reproved them, he was hurrying on to make up his lost time, when he recollected that he had used to females the masculine gender, and returned to repeat his reprimand to them in the feminine, and in so doing much to his added chagrin, lost one opportunity out of five on that day of performing his de votions! Though St. Paul tells the Athenians, "that they are in all things too superstitious," he never speaks contemptuously of that superstition, but avails himself of an altar, which they had dedicated to the Unknown God, to preach to them the truth as it is in Christ Jesus, and even quotes with approbation a sentiment of one of their heathen poets. Thus ought our clergy to avail themselves of a parity of Hindoo doctrine with the Trinity, Incarnation, and Atonement; and preach to that sect this true doctrine, as typified in the life and death of our blessed Sa A different course must be pursued with the Mussulmans, whose faithi hinges wholly on the unity and uncompanionibility of the Deity; but they are not Theists, as many ignorant travellers would make us believe; nor Fatalists, on the subject of predestination; for they believe in revelation, and a providence of God, nearly under the same qualifications as we, and perhaps all Protestant Christians, do. On the other hand, the worship of images, and other peculiarities in the catholic faith, have rendered futile any attempt of the Romish clergy to convert a single Mahommedan, and the only Hindoos among whom converts to any extent have been made were the Dutch subjects of Ceylon; and that selfish nation managed it, as they did every thing else, by employing in their service such natives as professed themselves so; which the Ceylonese readily did, by undergoing the ceremony of baptisin, which they understood not, and adopting notions of Trinity, Incarnation, and Atonement, which they could recognise in the miraculous Conception, sojourn on this earth, instruction, and mediation of their own Buddha! In the Island of Japan, the Dutch Protestants, with a like indifference, trampled on the cross, and disavowed Christianity, because the Roman Catholic missionaries 31 there, as they ultimately did every where else, when they were bold to detail their doctrine, made Christianity an object of odium and persecution. Charity, in the christian extent of the word, is equally the doctrine and practice of Hindoos and Mussulmans; and by the former hospitals are supported for animals of all sorts labouring under sickness and the infirmities of age. Forbes, in his Oriental Memoirs, mentions one at Surat, but states some ridiculous circumstances which must, I am persuaded, be the result of his own imperfect knowledge of the language and customs of the natives. When I mention the proficiency of the company's young servants in that knowledge, I meant, in particular, those of Bengal; for at Madras and Bombay, though many of them men of good intelligence otherwise, they are a century behind in that; and adventurers, who come raw from Europe to spy out the nakedness of the land are still more deficient; and in consequence, the volumes cf Lord V- and other large quartos of travels are filled with idle gossip and nonsense. After putting the charity of the piously disposed community of this country to an enormous expense by endeavouring to evangelize the debauched savages of the many delightful islands, where Cook and other travellers had been hospitably entertained during their progress through the great Pacific Ocean, the missionaries gave up the task of converting them to Christianity, though I fear they did much evil by perverting them from some semblance of that devotion and morality which those simple-minded and grateful sailors describe as once current among them. Since that, they made an attempt on the Hottentots and Caffres of South Africa; and Lichtenstein, in his late valuable Travels, tells us, that he met among the Bosjesmans a missionary of the name of Vander Kemp, who, after being an army officer and physician, took a serious turn, and studied theology; and getting himself ordained at Oxford, proceeded, in 1797, under the patronage of the Missionary Society, to the Cape of Good Hope, with a view of converting the infidels of those foreign parts. But the downright though simple Caffre, finding he ate, drank, and was subject to the same human infirmities as he was himself, and could perform none of those miracies with which he was ever ready to corroborate his doctrine, drove him without his district; when he collected |