te, especially well read in the
classics, and a good linguist. His bookcases showed several thousands of
good and well-thumbed books in English, French, Latin, and Greek.

Here we saw a large gilded car of Juggernaut, the Indian idol, which
makes its annual passage to and from the temple when the idol takes its
yearly airing, and is drawn by thousands of worshipers, who have come
from afar to assist at the strange and senseless festival. Pilgrims,
delirious with fanaticism, do sometimes throw themselves under the
ponderous wheels and perish there, but the stories current among writers
upon the subject as to the large number of these victims are much
exaggerated. This self-immolation, like that of the burning of widows
upon their husband's funeral pyres, has latterly been suppressed.
Between 1815 and 1826, fifteen thousand widows thus perished in India!
We were told that in some native provinces the practice was even now
secretly followed to some extent, but this is doubtful.

The grand pagoda of Tanjore has been rendered familiar to us by
engravings and is truly remarkable, being esteemed the finest specimen
in India of pagoda construction. It is fourteen stories high, and in the
absence of figures we should say was over two hundred feet from the base
to the top, and about eighty feet square at the ground. Among its other
strange idols and emblems it contains, in the area before the main
temple, in a demi-pagoda, the gigantic figure of a reclining bull, hewn
from a single mammoth block of black granite, and supposed to be of
great antiquity. It stands within an open space, raised some twelve feet
above the surrounding court, upon a granite plinth of the same color,
but how it could have been raised there intact is a marvel.

All of these structures are kindred in design, reproducing here at
Tanjore the spirit and many of the same figures which were seen at
Madura and Trichinopoly. As they are the temples of the same idolatrous
race this is natural. All are many centuries in age, and are
characterized by grotesqueness, lasciviousness, caricature, and infinite
detail of finish. Though they are outrageously gaudy in colors, yet are
they on so grand and costly a scale as to create amazement rather than
disgust. It would seem that a people equal to such efforts must have
been capable of something far better. In all grosser forms of
superstition and idolatry, carnal and material elements seem to be
essential to bind and att