gloomy and
painful, were it not that we are thus accidentally recalled to a
grievance in our Eastern administrations upon which we desire to enter a
remark. Life is languid, the blood becomes lazy, at the extremities of
our bodily system, as we ourselves know by dolorous experience under the
complaint of _purpura_; and analogously we find the utility of our
supreme government to droop and languish before it reaches the Indian
world. Hence partly it is (for nearer home we see nothing of the kind),
that foreign adventurers receive far too much encouragement from our
British Satraps in the East. To find themselves within 'the regions of
the morn,' and cheek to cheek with famous Sultans far inferior in power
and substantial splendour, makes our great governors naturally proud.
They are transfigured by necessity; and, losing none of their justice or
integrity, they lose a good deal of their civic humility. In such a
state they become capable of flattery, apt for the stratagems of foreign
adulation. We know not certainly that Mr. Bennett's injuries originated
in that source; though we suspect as much from the significant stories
which he tells of interloping foreigners on the pension list in Ceylon.
But this we _do_ know, that, from impulses easily deciphered, foreigners
creep into favour where an Englishman would not; and why? For two
reasons: 1st, because a foreigner _must_ be what is meant by 'an
adventurer,' and in his necessity he is allowed to find his excuse;
2ndly, because an Englishman, attempting to play the adulatory
character, finds an obstacle to his success in the standard of his own
national manners from which it requires a perpetual effort to wean
himself: whereas the oily and fluent obsequiousness found amongst
Italians and Frenchmen makes the transition to a perfect Phrygian
servility not only more easy to the artist, and less extravagantly
palpable, but more agreeable in the result to his employer. This cannot
be denied, and therefore needs no comment. But, as to the other reason,
viz., that a foreigner _must_ be an adventurer, allow us to explain.
Every man is an adventurer, every man is _in sensu strictissimo_
sometimes a knave.

You might imagine the situation of an adventurer who had figured
virtually in many lives, to resemble that of the late revered Mr. Prig
Bentham, when sitting like a contrite spider at the centre of his
'panopticon'; all the lines, which meet in a point at his seat, radiate
outwa