The condition of a Hindoo female, partially described in the preceding pages, is usually deplorable. The changes and vicissitudes to which her chequered life is subject are manifold. From the day she is ushered into the world to her dissolution, she is surrounded by adventitious circumstances, which, from the peculiar constitution of the society in which her life is cast, contain a larger admixture of misery than of happiness. Weak and frail as she assuredly is made by nature, the conventional forms and social usages to which she is religiously enjoined to adhere alike tend to deprive her of temporal and spiritual happiness. Born under unfavorable circumstances chiefly by reason of her sex, her life is rendered doubly miserable by the galling chains of ignorance and superstition. "Accursed the day when a woman child was born to me," was the emphatic exclamation of a Rajpoot when a female birth was announced. "The same motive," says Colonel Tod, "which studded Europe with convents, in which youth and beauty were immured until liberated by death, first prompted the Rajpoot to infanticide: and, however revolting the policy, it is perhaps kindness compared to incarceration. There can be no doubt that monastic seclusion, practised by the Frisians in France, the Langobardi in Italy and the Visigoths in Spain, was brought from Central Asia, the cradle of the Goths.[102] It is in fact a modification of the same feeling, which characterizes the Rajpoot and the ancient German warrior,--the dread of dishonor to the fair: the former raises the poniard to the breast of his wife rather than witness her captivity, and he gives opiate to the infant, whom, if he cannot portion and marry to her equal, he dare not see degraded." Descending from the lofty ideal of a chivalrous Rajpoot character to the more familiar portraiture of tame Hindoo life in Bengal, we find the same sad destiny is the portion of a female in both cases. "When a female is born no anxious inquiries await the mother--no greetings welcome the new comer, who appears an intruder on the scene, which often closes in the hour of its birth. But the very silence with which a female birth is accompanied forcibly expresses sorrow." In almost every stage of life, from infancy to old age, her existence presents a uniform picture of gloominess, uncertainty, despondency, and neglect. Freedom of thought and independence of action--the natural birthrights of a rational being--are denied her not by her Creator but by a selfish, narrow-minded and crafty priesthood. She is treated and disposed of as if she were entirely destitute of the feelings and ideas of a sentient being. She dare not emerge from the unhealthy seclusion of the closely confined _andarmahal_, or female department, where suspicions and jealousies, envy and malignity are not unfrequently brewing in the boiling caldron of domestic discord. Born within the precincts of an ill-ventilated zenana, and cooped up in the cage of an uncongenial cell,