itted Europe. He had
studied the history, the laws, and the usages of the East with an
industry such as is seldom found united to so much genius and so much
sensibility. Others have perhaps been equally laborious, and have
collected an equal mass of materials. But the manner in which Burke
brought his higher powers of intellect to work on statements of facts,
and on tables of figures, was peculiar to himself. In every part of
those huge bales of Indian information which repelled almost all other
readers, his mind, at once philosophical and poetical, found something
to instruct or to delight. His reason analyzed and digested those vast
and shapeless masses; his imagination animated and colored them. Out of
darkness, and dulness, and confusion, he formed a multitude of ingenious
theories and vivid pictures. He had, in the highest degree, that noble
faculty whereby man is able to live in the past and in the future, in
the distant and in the unreal. India and its inhabitants were not to
him, as to most Englishmen, mere names and abstractions, but a real
country and a real people. The burning sun, the strange vegetation of
the palm and the cocoa tree, the rice-field, the tank, the huge trees,
older than the Mogul empire, under which the village crowds assemble,
the thatched roof of the peasant's hut, the rich tracery of the mosque
where the imaum prays with his face to Mecca, the drums, and banners,
and gaudy idols, the devotee swinging in the air, the graceful maiden,
with the pitcher on her head, descending the steps to the riverside, the
black faces, the long beards, the yellow streaks of sect, the turbans
and the flowing robes, the spears and the silver maces, the elephants
with their canopies of state, the gorgeous palanquin of the prince, and
the close litter of the noble lady,--all these things were to him as the
objects amidst which his own life had been passed, as the objects which
lay on the road between Beaconsfield and St. James's Street. All India
was present to the eye of his mind, from the halls where suitors laid
gold and perfumes at the feet of sovereigns to the wild moor where the
gypsy camp was pitched, from the bazaar, humming like a beehive with the
crowd of buyers and sellers, to the jungle where the lonely courier
shakes his bunch of iron rings to scare away the hyenas. He had just as
lively an idea of the insurrection at Benares as of Lord George Gordon's
riots, and of the execution of Nuncomar as of th