throne these pageant kings, all Maharashtra would have arisen to assert the cause of the descendants of Sivajee, the lawful dynasty of their country. A singular qualification of the principles of legitimate succession; because it was generally admitted by the nation as well as the usurping parties; and a distinction equally characteristic of the Mahratta chieftains and people, whose prejudices in favour of hereditary family rights was thus satisfied while the nominal sovereignty of their princes was preserved, although their power and even their personal liberty were openly annihilated.

Yet the dynasty of Satara has been fated to survive the ruin of its insolent servant-princes. When, in the Pindharee war of 1819, the bad faith, the secret perfidy, and the open hostility of the last Peishwa provoked the British government, under the Marquis of Hastings' administration, to dethrone him, to subvert the dynasty, and to dismember and dissolve the empire of Poona, the raja of Satara, who had been the Peishwa's captive, was liberated and replaced on his ancestors' throne in the latter capital. There, under a thraldom at least milder than the yoke of the Peishwas, he is yet permitted to reign. The standard of Sivajee floats impotently over the rock of Satara, and his feeble descendants preserve the idle semblance of greatness.

To return from this little digression. It was under Bajee Rao, the son of Ballajee, and the second of the hereditary Peishwas, perhaps the most illustrious, or at least the fairest, character in Hindoo history, that the Mahratta power reached its zenith. "Now is our time," said this oriental hero, at a public council, to his imbecile sovereign, "to drive strangers from the land of the Hindoos, and to acquire immortal renown. By directing our efforts to Hindostan, the Mahratta standard in your reign shall fly from the Kistna to the Attock." Even the degenerate raja caught a spark of his minister's fire, and the Mahratta MS. records his answer,-" You shall plant it on the Himmalya, you are indeed the noble son of a worthy father." The prophetic boast was not literally fulfilled: but the Mahratta power during the life of Bajee Rao was the terror of all India. From the epoch of his death, in 1740, the strength of the predatory empire may be considered to have gradually declined, although the Mahrattas continued to extend their depredations for twenty years longer, until their right to tribute was acknowledged on the banks of the Coleroon, and the Deccan horse had quenched their thirst in the waters of the Indus.'

But at this era, the first effectual curb was set upon the wild Mahratta ambition. Rendered audacious by the triumph of a headlong career, the reigning Peishwa impelled the whole immense numerical force of the Mahratta empire against Delhi, to dispute the possession of that capital and the disposal of the Moghul throne with the Abdalla dynasty of the Afghans. All the Mahratta chieftains contributed their forces, to the prodigious number of 270,000 fighting men; so immense and so splendid an army of the

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nation had never before taken the field; and the whole Hindoo power of southern India was set in array against the Mahomedans of the north. At the great and decisive battle of Panniput, above Delhi, in the year 1761, the Mahratta host was totally overthrown; in the battle, the pursuit, and the cold-blooded slaughter of their prisoners, two hundred thousand men, including the Peishwa's eldest son, cousin, and many other leaders of note, were cut to pieces by the merciless Afghans; and Maharashtra never afterwards thoroughly recovered the shock of this tremendous defeat.

Hitherto the English East India Company had come very little into collision with the Mahratta power; for their establishments on the Bombay coast were yet in their infancy when compared with those in the presidencies of Bengal and Madras. In the latter, they had just at this juncture overcome their rivals the French; and it was an auspicious circumstance for the growth of the British ascendancy in India that they were not forced into a contest with the Mahratta empire, until the violence of its strength was broken, its energies were decayed, and its provinces were torn asunder, by selfish leaders, into independent and discordant military despotisms. The subsequent history of Mahratta politics, in connection with the establishment of our empire, and of the intrigues, and warfare which have terminated in the total downfal of Mahratta sovereignty, is sufficiently known in its general outlines. All the details of that labour, by which courage and policy have built up the glories of a mighty empire, cannot be too closely or too often studied; and we may conclude by assuring our readers that they will nowhere find, in any work hitherto published, so careful, so minute, or so thoroughly satisfactory an exposition as Captain Duff has given in the last half of his annals, of the majestic progress of those events which have led to the subjection of all Maharashtra to the British sceptre.

ART. II. The Boyne Water, a Tale, by the O'Hara Family. 3 Vols. post 8vo. 17. 118. 6d. London. Simpkin and Marshall. 1826. 'THE Boyne Water,' it is scarcely necessary to say, is a national and historical tale of Ireland, the scene of which is laid in the most eventful epoch in all the annals of that unhappy country :-the great struggle between the partisans of James II. and William III., the fierce and deadly conflict between the men of the old and the new faith. Almost all the most distinguished personages who figured in that memorable epoch and struggle, the two kings themselves, Schomberg and Tyrconnel, Sarsfield, Hamilton, Ginkle, Walker of Londonderry, the Jesuit Petre, and the Jesuit Burnet,' as our author would couple them, even the infamous Galmoy, and the monster Kirke, are all here introduced in their several characters and actions, and frequently even in the sentiments which they have

delivered and recorded for themselves, or in the language which friend and foe have ascribed to their utterance. The work, in short, is less a novel than a highly coloured narrative of the whole course of the civil war in Ireland, from the closing of the gates of Londonderry, to the capitulation of Limerick; and its pages are occupied much less with the fortunes of the wholly fictitious characters of the tale, than with the discussion of the political arguments, the motives of the political parties, and the various public conduct of all the real actors of the times.

The author of these volumes had already earned some reputation for himself, by his first collection of: Irish national "Tales by the O'Hara Family ;" and he has certainly given very many indications of at least undiminished powers as a novelist in the present work. He shows in many places great mastery in the display of the passions, though he succeeds worst in pathos; he has a shrewd insight into human nature generally, and a perfect acquaintance with the genuine eccentricities of the Irish character in particular; and we know few of his compeers who can imagine and throw off a scene of strife or terror with a bolder or more vigorous pencil. But admitting all these, and some other proofs of talent in the volumes before us, we can, upon the present occasion, commend neither his choice of a subject, nor his manner of treating it. When we recollect the successful execution of his former work, in which both the characters and events were wholly the creations of his fancy, we cannot help regretting that he has abandoned a path of writing equally attractive to his readers, and safe for his own reputation, to possess himself, with very questionable propriety and hazardous enterprise, of the debateable ground which he has here chosen. We should rather have seen another series of his stories, national and characteristic of his countrymen as possible, but not national and historical; not awakening the memory of all that fierce spirit of religious dissention, which near a century and a half, and the gradual influence of more tolerant and charitable principles, have scarcely had power to soothe and to put to rest.

He has, it is true, given us to understand from his preface, that nothing is farther from his design than to perpetuate civil and religious dissentions; that he seeks to conciliate parties by an impartial picture of the memorable struggle which produced them; that he desires only in the historical part of his motley office to substitute truth for popular stories, facts for delusions, and a fair impartial narrative of events for a century of misrepresentations. Moreover we are sensible that the story of that contest has hitherto been received entirely from the report of the victors; and that, in their own country at least, due honour and justice have not always been rendered to the memory of the gallant men who shed their blood, and sacrificed their possessions and their native land in the cause of the monarch and the faith to whose support they held themselves conscientiously bound. All this we know: but yet we have found

cause in these volumes to see that, if conciliation was the design of the author, it is far from being the tendency of his book, and that, if some of the events of the times of which he treats have hitherto been ungenerously distorted to the prejudice of a fallen cause, he has now wrested them so yiolently in an opposite direction, that they are yet wider than ever from the line of impartial truth.

It will scarcely be expected of us that we should gravely follow a mere work of fiction through its fanciful course, to detect and to specify all the latent historical errors and partialities which are insinuated in the web of its story. But we encounter so bold and startling a proposition in the very preface, that we need scarcely go farther to give a general idea of the strong party bias under which it has been written. The reader probably will not be prepared for the assertion, that 'since some late publications, and particularly since that of the "Life of James II. King of England, collected out of memoirs writ of his own hand," edited from the authentic MSS. by the librarian at Carlton House, and published under the auspices of his present gracious majesty, Englishmen have ceased to attribute to the deposed monarch such civil tyranny, and such plotting against their religion, as his hostile contemporaries found it politic to lay at his door.' Our author may, on the contrary, be assured that, if there be any point on which Englishmen are agreed, it is in their judgment against the arbitrary principles of government on which James would have supported his throne, and in the necessity of resistance to those principles. But our author's whole portrait of James is extravagantly partial.

As to the plot of our tale, its structure is very simple and readily explained. It is founded chiefly upon the double attachment between a young protestant gentleman of fortune, Evelyn, and his orphan sister Esther, and Eva and Edmund, the motherless children of M'Donnell, a Roman Catholic chieftain of the noble house of Antrim, who had been dispossessed of great part of his property under the iron tyranny of Cromwell. The scene is of course laid in the north of Ireland, and the tale opens in 1685, on the accession of James II. The first volume, which runs through the three earliest years of that monarch's reign, is occupied with the friendship and loves of the young parties, the gradual approach of their double marriage, and the fearful warnings by which Onagh, a sibyl, half insane, half malignant, but gifted with prophetic powers, seeks to avert the union between M'Donnell and Esther Evelyn. Meanwhile the progress of civil and religious discord in Ireland, the increasing fears and exasperation of the hostile parties, and the preparations for an intestine war, are admirably delineated. The young men, Evelyn and M'Donnell, have at first the good sense to observe and to lament the madness of the opposing factions: but they are at length secretly persuaded, Evelyn by the famous Walker of Londonderry, and M'Donnell by O'Haggerty,

a jesuit, to enrol themselves respectively in the armed associations of the opposing religions; and by a mutual reserve, unnatural in so close an intimacy, they are led to conceal their engagements each from the other. The business of the marriage between the young friends and their sisters, however, still proceeds; and they assemble at the castle of Lord Antrim at the close of the year 1688, under these ominous circumstances, for the celebration of the nuptials. The first volume closes with the following scene.

'The only thing that interfered with the solemn and quiet nature of the place, and of the ceremonies to be solemnized in it, was the continued, and, indeed, increased violence of the weather. It blew a very hurricane; and the rain beat with such force upon the roof, and against the windows, of the solitary little chapel, as filled its interior with unintermitted and almost alarming sound. Through the low windows, nearly on a level with the ground, abroad, the night seemed raven-black.

'Scarce had the brides appeared at the door opposite that through which the bridegrooms and their party entered, when Evelyn, attended by Edmund McDonnell as his brideman, and by the old Earl of Antrim, to give him away," advanced to Eva, took her hand, and led her, amid her group of beautiful bridemaids, and while the earl's lady held her other hand, towards the altar. All entered the railed sanctuary; ascended the steps of the altar; stood on the platform; and, in a few moments, Evelyn ́ and Eva M Donnell-according to the forms of the Roman Catholic church-were married.

In their turn, Edmund, his brideman, and his old father, advanced to Esther. He took, in his, a cold and shivering hand, and the veil she wore did not hide her raining tears, nor her blanched cheek and ashy lips. Gently, gracefully, and proudly, he led her to the railings of the sanctuary; she stumbled, and had nearly fallen, in the effort to step the single step that elevated it above the floor of the chapel. As she passed close by a side-window, just at the altar, she started-sprung from it, and uttered a low scream. Edmund looked at the window; it was black and blank, and no cause appeared for Esther's terror, though now she shuddered so violently as almost to swoon away. Assisted by her lover, her noble hostess, and her frightened bridemaids, Esther gained at length the platform of the altar. The white-headed and palsied old priest again opened his book, and began the second marriage ceremony: a clattering of horse-hoofs was heard without, and he paused. In a moment after, a small door, at the remote end of the building, through which the peasantry around used to enter to mass, was flung open, and gave ingress to a gust of storm so furious, that it extinguished nearly all the lights in the chapel; and with it came in a man, enveloped in an ample ridingcloak, who walked straight up the aisle to the altar, holding an open letter in his hand. As he gained the altar, all recognized the Rev. George Walker.

"You are late, Mr. Walker," said Evelyn, who now stood outside the rails.

""Am I too late?" asked Walker, eagerly.

"I present you Mrs. Evelyn, sir.”

"There has been a clergyman of the established church here?"