Bengal now, his indignation and amazement would know no bounds in witnessing the sacerdotal class reduced to the humiliating position of a servile, cringing and mercenary crowd of men. Their original prestige has suffered a total shipwreck. Generally speaking, a Brahmin of the present day is practically a Soodra (the most inferior class) of the past age, irretrievably sunk in honor and dignity. Indeed it was one of the curses of the Vedic period that to be a Brahmin of the present _Kali yagu_ would be an impersonation of corruption, baseness and venality. There is a common saying amongst the Natives that a Brahmin is a beggar even if he were possessed of a lakh of Rupees (L10,000.) It is a lamentable fact that impecuniosity is the common lot of the class. In ordinary conversation, when the question of the comparative fortunes of the different classes is introduced, a Brahmin is often heard to lament his most impecunious lot. The gains of the sacerdotal class of the present day have been reduced to the lowest scale imaginable. If an officiating priest can make ten Rupees a month, he considers himself very well off. He can no longer plume himself on his religious purity and mental superiority, once so pre-eminently characteristic of the order. The spread of English education has sounded the death-knell of his spiritual ascendancy. In short, his fate is doomed; he must bear or must forbear, as seems to him best. The tide of improvement will continue to roll on uninterruptedly, in spite of every "freezing and blighting influence," and we heartily rejoice to discover already that the "tender blade is grown into the green ear, and from the green ear to the rich and ripened corn." When, a few years ago, Sir Richard Temple carefully examined the Criminal Statistics of Bengal, he was most deeply concerned to find that the proportion of the Brahmin criminals in the jails of the Province far outnumbered that of any other caste. This is an astounding fact, bearing the most unimpeachable testimony to the very lamentable deterioration of the Hindoo ecclesiastical class in our days. To expatiate on the subject would be unpalatable. But we believe we can point with a degree of pardonable pride to a past period when nine men of literary genius, among whom the renowned Kalidas, the Indian Shakespeare, was the most brilliant, flourished in the Court of Vikramaditya in Ougein; but dynastic changes were simultaneously accompanied by the rapid decline of learning as well as of religious purity.