himself called by all the servants on my establishment.” A member of the Civil Service was formerly bound by a covenant to serve the East India Company for the best part of his life. He now enters into a covenant to serve the Queen-Empress of India for a similar term of years. There is a great gulf between the covenanted and uncovenanted servants of the Queen, but at present we can only treat of the covenanted man. In “vulgar parlance” he used to be described as an individual worth £300 a year dead or alive, and this is still his specific social valuation. If he dies and leaves a widow, she will receive from the Civil Fund an annual sum of £300 a year. If whilst he lives he falls into trouble or sickness, he is still entitled by his covenant to a subsistence allowance of £300 a year. He may be, and usually is, a much larger partaker in the pecuniary advantages of his service. But the time was when in the matrimonial market of Calcutta the solid advantages of the covenanted young civilian might thus be weighed against the brilliant uniforms and ever-willing swords of his military rivals; and if the young man owned a buggy, and a silver teapot, and had subscribed to the Civil Fund, he was looked on as eligible for immediate wedlock. Under the competitive system of admission to the Civil Service, the civilian is now such a very superior person in ability and acquirements, that we will not attempt to describe him. But we will first refer to the men of the old school, before the competitive system was invented and applied to the Indian Civil Service. We will look back to the time when the civilian in the earliest stage of his Indian career was a most important factor in the fashionable world of Calcutta. Forty or fifty years ago the young civilian, on landing in India, was entered as a student in the College of Fort William. He had passed through the course of instruction and examinations of the old college at Hertford and Haileybury. Discipline at those institutions is said to have been sufficiently lax and irregular. But it was required by the ruling authorities of India that the young civilian, on arriving in India, should again submit himself to some sort of college discipline whilst he was studying the native languages of India in Calcutta. A fine range of buildings called Writers’ Buildings represented the Calcutta College. A young civilian was in those times styled a Writer. His appointment was called a Writership. This was an inheritance of the mercantile nomenclature of the East India Company. The Calcutta College owed its constitution and existence in a great measure to the classical theories of the great Marquis of Wellesley when Governor-General of India. But classical theories combined with Oriental developments are calculated to produce a somewhat hybrid progeny. The young civilians landed in India with a not unjustifiable notion of their own personal and social importance. On leaving their English college, the Chairman of the Court