a book in his hand. I took the book. It was not
Boccaccio; it was not Rabelais; it was not even Swinburne. I felt that
something must be wrong. I turned to the title-page. I found it was a
poem printed for private circulation by the _Government of India_. It
was called "The Anthropomorphous Baboo subtilised into Man."]

When I was at Lhassa the Dalai Lama told me that a virtuous
cow-hippopotamus by metempsychosis might, under unfavourable
circumstances, become an undergraduate of the Calcutta University, and
that, when patent-leather shoes and English supervened, the thing was
a Baboo. [This sounds very plausible; but how about the prehensile
tail which the Education Department finds so much in the way of
improvement, which indeed is said to preclude all access to the
Bengali mind, and which can grasp everything but an idea, even an
inquisitorial schoolmaster? "Hereby hangs a tail" is a motto in which
Edward Gibbon had no monopoly.]

I forget whether it was the Duke of Buckingham, or Mr. Lethbridge, or
General Scindia--I always mix up these C.I.E.'s together in my mind
somehow--who told me that a Bengali Baboo had never been known to
laugh, but only to giggle with clicking noises like a crocodile. Now
this is very telling evidence, because if a Baboo does not laugh at a
C.I.E. he will laugh at nothing. The faculty must be wanting.

[The Raja of Fattehpur, Member of the Legislative Council, and
commonly known as "Joe Hookham," says that fossil Baboos have been
found in Orissa with the cuckoo-bone, everything that a schoolmaster
could wish. Now "Joe" is a palaeontologist not to be sneezed at. This
confirms the opinion of General Cunningham that the mounted figure in
the neighbourhood of Lahore represents a Bengali washerwoman riding to
the _Ghat_ to perform a lustration. Because unless the _os coccyx_
were all right it would be as difficult to ride a bullock as to get
educated by the usual process.]

When Lord Macaulay said that what the milk was to the cocoanut, what
beauty was to the buffalo, and what scandal was to woman, that Dr.
Johnson's Dictionary was to the Bengali Baboo, he unquestionably spoke
in terms of figurative exaggeration; nevertheless, a core of truth
lies hidden in his remark. It is by the Baboo's words you know the
Baboo. The true Baboo is full of words and phrases--full of
inappropriate words and phrases lying about like dead men on a
battlefield, in heaps to be carted away promiscuously, without