intrigue includes, and indeed usually consists of, the very smallest matters, in dealing with which the political officer only keeps his weapons sharpened in readiness to deal with any matter of real gravity and importance. A resident formerly was almost isolated from the fellowship of his own countrymen, save of those who constituted his own staff or assistants. But this form of society is always mentally unwholesome, as the chief finds no one who is prepared openly to differ from his opinions, or to maintain any serious argument against him. Hence the resident of the pre-mutiny period sometimes became a rather pompous self-opiniated punctilious and artificial sort of person, who is exemplified in Sir Solomon Fraser, K.C.B. The race of political officers is now comparatively extinct, and the circumstances under which they exist have been so materially altered by the introduction of railways and the general improvement in the means of interchanging ideas with their fellow-men, that any man who allowed himself to acquire the ways and habits, of his fossil predecessors would probably be deemed unfit for his post, although he will still be careful to observe the professional courtesy and demeanour for which we ought not to fail to give due credit to the members of the old school of politicals. Writing as we are with reference to the province of Bengal, it may be said that political residents are non-existent, and the few Governor-General’s agents, who are still employed at the Court of the Nawab of Morshedabad and on some of the frontier divisions, have been much shorn of their honours and emoluments.