India in the eighteenth
century.

These are the serious obstacles which have discouraged Anglo-Indians
from attempting the pure historical romance. They knew the country too
well for concocting stories after the fashion of Thomas Moore's _Lalla
Rookh_, with gallant chieftains and beauteous maidens who have nothing
Oriental about them except a few set Eastern phrases, turbans,
daggers, and jewellery. They could not use the true local colour, the
real temper and talk of the Indian East, without great risk of
becoming neither intelligible nor interesting to the English public at
large. It may be said that before our own day there has been only one
author who has successfully overcome these difficulties--Meadows
Taylor, who wrote a romantic novel, now almost forgotten, founded upon
the history of Western India in the seventeenth century. The period
was skilfully chosen, for it is the time of the Moghul emperor
Aurungzeb's long war against the Mohammedan kingdoms in the Dekhan,
and of the Maratha insurrection under Sivaji, which eventually ruined
the Moghul empire. The daring murder of a Mohammedan governor by
Sivaji, the Maratha hero who freed his countrymen from an alien yoke,
is still kept in patriotic remembrance throughout Western India. Nor
is there anything in such a natural sentiment that need give umbrage
to Englishmen; although the liberality of a recent English governor of
Bombay who headed a list of subscriptions for public commemoration of
the deed, betrayed a somewhat simple-minded unreadiness to appreciate
the significance of historical analogies.

Meadows Taylor has treated this subject with very creditable success.
He had lived long in that part of the country; he knew the localities;
he was unusually conversant with the manners and feelings of the
people, and he had the luck to be among them before the old and rough
state of society, with its lawless and turbulent elements, had
disappeared. He had himself been in the service of a native prince
whose governing methods were no better, in some respects worse, than
those of the seventeenth century; and his possession of good natural
literary faculty made up in him a rare combination of qualifications
for venturing upon an Indian romance. The result has been that _Tara_
has not fallen into complete oblivion, though one may doubt whether it
would now be thought generally readable. Although written so late as
1863, the influence of Walter Scott's mediaeval roma