Surely this is the very strangest spectacle exhibited on earth:  a kingdom within a kingdom, an imperium in imperio, settled and maintaining itself for centuries in defiance of all that Pagan, that Mahommedan, that Jew, or that Christian, could do.  The reader will remember the case of the British envoy to Geneva, who being ordered in great wrath to “quit the territories of the republic in twenty-four hours,” replied, “By all means:  in ten minutes.”  And here was a little bantam kingdom, not much bigger than the irate republic, having its separate sultan, with full-mounted establishment of peacock’s feathers, white elephants, Moorish eunuchs, armies, cymbals, dulcimers, and all kinds of music, tormentors, and executioners; whilst his majesty crowed defiance across the ocean to all other kings, rajahs, soldans, kesars, “flowery” emperors, and “golden-feet,” east or west, be the same more or less; and really with some reason.  For though it certainly is amusing to hear of a kingdom no bigger than Stirlingshire with the half of Perthshire, standing erect and maintaining perpetual war with all the rest of Scotland, a little nucleus of pugnacity, sixty miles by twenty-four, rather more than a match for the lazy lubber, nine hundred miles long, that dandled it in its arms; yet, as the trick was done, we cease to find it ridiculous.

For the trick was done:  and that reminds us to give the history of Ceylon in its two sections, which will not prove much longer than the history of Tom Thumb.  Precisely three centuries before Waterloo, viz. Anno Domini 1515, a Portuguese admiral hoisted his sovereign’s flag, and formed a durable settlement at Columbo, which was, and is, considered the maritime capital of the island.  Very nearly halfway on the interval of time between this event and Waterloo, viz. in 1656 (ante-penultimate year of Cromwell,) the Portuguese nation made over, by treaty, this settlement to the Dutch; which, of itself, seems to mark that the sun of the former people was now declining to the west.  In 1796, now forty-seven years ago, it arose out of the French revolutionary war—­so disastrous for Holland—­that the Dutch surrendered it per force to the British, who are not very likely to surrender it in their turn on any terms, or at any gentleman’s request.  Up to this time, when Ceylon passed under our flag, it is to be observed that no progress whatever, not the least, had been made in mastering the peach-stone, that old central nuisance of the island.  The little monster still crowed, and flapped his wings on his dunghill, as had been his custom always in the afternoon for certain centuries.  But nothing on earth is immortal:  even mighty bantams must have their decline and fall; and omens began to show out that soon there would be a dust with the new master at Columbo.  Seven years after our debut on that stage, the dust began.  By the way, it is perhaps an impertinence to remark it, but there