And verily those who have been prepared for a queer volume, will not be
disappointed in the diary of our choleric and corpulent colonel. If ever
the assurance, which seems to be regarded as indispensable in the preface
to works of this class, that the author "wrote the following pages purely
for his own amusement," bore the stamp of unequivocal truth, it is in the
present instance; and, notwithstanding the asseverations of Mr Colburn and
his literary employés, it is difficult to conceive that any revision
whatever can have been bestowed on the rough notes of the writer, since
they were first hastily committed to paper amidst the scenes which they
describe. The style is as rambling and unconnected as the incidents to
which it refers; but wherever the author's devious footsteps lead us, from
the jungles of Bundelcund to the holy ghâts of Hurdwar, the principal
figure is always that of the colonel himself, who, in the portly
magnificence of twenty stone minus two pounds, fills up the whole
foreground with himself and his accessories of servants, elephant, stud,
Nagoree cows, and other component parts of the _suwarree_ or suite of a
_Qui-hye_, who can afford to make himself comfortable after the fashion of
the country. The quantity (sometimes not trifling) and quality of his
meals, the consequent state of his digestion, and his endless rows on the
score of accommodations and forage with thannadars, darogahs, kutwals, and
all the other designations for Hindoo and Hindoostani jacks-in-office,
(for to Feringhi society he appears to have been not very partial,) may
doubtless have been points of peculiar interest to the colonel himself,
but are not likely to engage the attention of the world in general, and
had better have been omitted in the revision of the diary, instead of
being chronicled, as they are on all occasions, with wearisome minuteness
of detail. But with all these drawbacks, a man who, as he says of himself,
"has dwelt in India twenty-five years, and traversed it from the snowy
range to Bombay on the west, must have seen something of the country, and
may be supposed to know something of the natives"--among whom, by the way,
he seems to have mingled more familiarly than most Feringhis; and in spite
of all the egotism and rigmarole with which his pages abound, the rambles
of this "stout gentleman" through Upper India, and some other parts of the
country not much visited by Europeans, present us with a good deal of
plain sense and sterling matter, viewed, it is true, with the eccentric
eye of a humorist, and frequently couched in very odd phraseology; but not
the less true on that account. His opinions on all men and all things are
expressed with the same honesty and candour with which he narrates the
various scrapes in which he was involved, while pushing right a-head like
an elephant through a jungle;--and though laughing at him quite as often
as with him, we have found the colonel, on the whole, far from an
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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