families, or village communities.  Should he arrest such people, he would have to subsist and accommodate them at his own cost, or to send them to Lucknow, with the assurance that they would in a few days or a few weeks purchase their way out again, in spite of the clearest proofs of the murders, robberies, torturings, dishonourings, house-burning, &c., which they have committed.  No sentence, which any one local authority could pass on such offenders, would be recognised by any other authority in the State, as valid or sufficient to justify him in receiving and holding them in confinement for a single day.  The local authorities, therefore, either leave the wrong-doers unmolested, with the understanding that they are to abstain from doing any such wrong within their jurisdictions as may endanger or impede the collection of revenues during their period of office, or release them with that understanding after they have squeezed all they can out of them.  The wrong-doers can so abstain, and still be able to murder, rob, torture, dishonour, and burn, upon a pretty large scale; and where they are so numerous, and so ready to unite for purposes “offensive and defensive,” and the local authorities so generally connive at or quietly acquiesce all their misdeeds, any attempt on the part of an honest or overzealous individual to put them down would be sure to result in his speedy and utter ruin!

To refer such sufferers to the authorities at Lucknow would be a still more cruel mockery.  The present sovereign never hears a complaint or reads a petition or report of any kind.  He is entirely taken up in the pursuit of his personal gratifications.  He has no desire to be thought to take any interest whatever in public affairs; and is altogether regardless of the duties and responsibilities of his high office.  He lives, exclusively, in the society of fiddlers, eunuchs, and women:  he has done so since his childhood, and is likely to do so to the last.  His disrelish for any other society has become inveterate:  he cannot keep awake in any other.  In spite of average natural capacity, and more than average facility in the cultivation of light literature, or at least “de faire des petits vers de sa focon,” his understanding has become so emasculated, that he is altogether unfit for the conduct of his domestic, much less his public, affairs.  He sees occasionally his prime minister, who takes care to persuade him that he does all that a King ought to do; and nothing whatever of any other minister.  He holds no communication whatever with brothers, uncles, cousins, or any of the native gentlemen at Lucknow, or the landed or official aristocracy of the country.  He sometimes admits a few poets or poetasters to hear and praise his verses, and commands the unwilling attendance of some of his relations, to witness and applaud the acting of some of his own silly comedies, on the penalty of forfeiting their stipends; but any one who presumes to approach him, even in his rides or drives, with a petition for justice, is instantly clapped into prison, or otherwise severely punished.