This dreadful fanaticism has existed for more than four thousand years, amongst a mild people, who would fear to kill a grasshopper. The priests cannot force a widow to burn herself; for the invariable law is, that the self-devotion must be absolutely voluntary. The longest married of the wives of the deceased has the first refusal of the honor of mounting the funeral-pile; if she is not inclined, the second presents herself; and so of the rest. It is said, that on one occasion seventeen burned themselves at once on the pile of a rajah: but these sacrifices are now very rare; the faith has become weaker since the Mahometans have governed a great part of the country, and the Europeans traded with the rest. Still, there is scarcely a governor of Madras or Pondicherry who has not seen some Indian woman voluntarily perish in the flames. Mr. Holwell relates that a young widow of nineteen, of singular beauty, and the mother of three children, burned herself in the presence of Mrs. Russell, wife of the admiral then in the Madras roads. She resisted the tears and the prayers of all present; Mrs. Russell conjured her, in the name of her children, not to leave them orphans. The Indian woman answered, "God, who has given them birth, will take care of them." She then arranged everything herself, set fire to the pile with her own hand, and consummated her sacrifice with as much serenity as one of our nuns lights the tapers. Mr. Charnock, an English merchant, one day seeing one of these astonishing victims, young and lovely, on her way to the funeral-pile, dragged her away by force when she was about to set fire to it, and, with the assistance of some of his countrymen, carried her of! and married her. The people regarded this act as the most horrible sacrilege. Why do husbands never burn themselves, that they may join their wives? Why has a sex, naturally weak and timid, always had this frantic resolution? Is it because tradition does not say that a man ever married a daughter of Brahma, while it does affirm that an Indian woman was married to a son of that divinity? Is it because women are more superstitious than men? Or is it because their imaginations are weaker, more tender, and more easily governed? The ancient Brahmins sometimes burned themselves to prevent the pains and the languor of old age; but, above all, to make themselves admired. Calanus would not, perhaps, have placed himself on the pile, but for the purpose of being gazed at by Alexander. The Christian renegade Peregrinus burned himself in public, for the same reason that a madman goes about the streets dressed like an Armenian, to attract the notice of the populace. Is there not also an unfortunate mixture of vanity in this terrible sacrifice of the Indian women? Perhaps, if a law were passed that the burning should take place in the presence of one waiting woman only, this abominable custom would be forever destroyed.