career of improvement.  Of the roads laid open through the island, we have spoken.  The attempts at improvement of the agriculture and horticulture furnish matter already for a romance, if told of any other than this wonderful labyrinth of climates.  The openings for commercial improvement are not less splendid.  It is a fact infamous to the Ceylonese, that an island, which might easily support twenty millions of people, has been liable to famine, not unfrequently, with a population of fifteen hundred thousand.  This has already ceased to be a possibility:  is that a blessing of British rule?  Not only many new varieties of rice have been introduced, and are now being introduced, adapted to opposite extremes of weather:  and soil—­some to the low grounds warm and abundantly irrigated, some to the dry grounds demanding far less of moisture—­but also other and various substitutes have been presented to Ceylon.  Manioc, maize, the potato, the turnip, have all been cultivated.  Mr Bennett himself would, in ancient Greece, have had many statues raised to his honour for his exemplary bounties of innovation.  The food of the people is now secure.  And, as regard their clothing or their exports, there is absolutely no end to the new prospects opened before them by the English.  Is cotton a British gift?  Is sugar?  Is coffee?  We are not the men lazily and avariciously to anchor our hopes on a pearl fishery; we rouse the natives to cultivate their salt fish and shark fisheries.  Tea will soon be cultivated more hopefully than in Assam.  Sugar, coffee, cinnamon, pepper, are all cultivated already.  Silk worms and mulberry-trees were tried with success, and opium with virtual success, (though in that instance defeated by an accident,) under the auspices of Mr Bennett.  Hemp (and surely it is wanted?) will be introduced abundantly:  indigo is not only grown in plenty, but it appears that a beautiful variety of indigo, a violet-coloured indigo, exists as a weed in Ceylon.  Finally, in the running over hastily the summa genera of products by which Ceylon will soon make her name known to the ends of the earth, we may add, that salt provisions in every kind, of which hitherto Ceylon did not furnish an ounce, will now be supplied redundantly; the great mart for this will be in the vast bosom of the Indian ocean; and at the same time we shall see the scandal wiped away—­that Ceylon, the headquarters of the British navy in the East, could not supply a cock-boat in distress with a week’s salt provisions, from her own myriads of cattle, zebus, buffaloes, or cows.

Ceylon has this one disadvantage for purposes of theatrical effect; she is like a star rising heliacally, and hidden in the blaze of the sun:  any island, however magnificent, becomes lost in the blaze of India.  But that does not affect the realities of the case.  She has that within which passes show.  Her one calamity is in the laziness of her native population; though in this respect the Kandyans