is to other Hindoos, that was Nuncomar to other Bengalees.  The physical organisation of the Bengalee is feeble even to effeminacy.  He lives in a constant vapour bath.  His pursuits are sedentary, his limbs delicate, his movements languid.  During many ages he has been trampled upon by men of bolder and more hardy breeds.  Courage, independence, veracity, are qualities to which his constitution and his situation are equally unfavourable.  His mind bears a singular analogy to his body.  It is weak even to helplessness for purposes of manly resistance; but its suppleness and its tact move the children of sterner climates to admiration not unmingled with contempt.  All those arts which are the natural defence of the weak are more familiar to this subtle race than to the Ionian of the time of Juvenal, or to the Jew of the dark ages.  What the horns are to the buffalo, what the paw is to the tiger, what the sting is to the bee, what beauty, according to the old Greek song, is to woman, deceit is to the Bengalee.  Large promises, smooth excuses, elaborate tissues of circumstantial falsehood, chicanery, perjury, forgery, are the weapons, offensive and defensive, of the people of the Lower Ganges.  All those millions do not furnish one sepoy to the armies of the Company.  But as userers, as money-changers, as sharp legal practitioners, no class of human beings can bear a comparison with them.  With all his softness, the Bengalee is by no means placable in his enmities or prone to pity.  The pertinacity with which he adheres to his purposes yields only to the immediate pressure of fear.  Nor does he lack a certain kind of courage which is often wanting to his masters.  To inevitable evils he is sometimes found to oppose a passive fortitude, such as the Stoics attributed to their ideal sage.  An European warrior who rushes on a battery of cannon with a loud hurrah, will sometimes shriek under the surgeon’s knife, and fall in an agony of despair at the sentence of death.  But the Bengalee, who would see his country overrun, his house laid in ashes, his children murdered or dishonoured, without having the spirit to strike one blow, has yet been known to endure torture with the firmness of Mucius, and to mount the scaffold with the steady step and even pulse of Algernon Sydney.

In Nuncomar, the national character was strongly and with exaggeration personified.  The Company’s servants had repeatedly detected him in the most criminal intrigues.  On one occasion he brought a false charge against another Hindoo, and tried to substantiate it by producing forged documents.  On another occasion it was discovered that, while professing the strongest attachment to the English, he was engaged in several conspiracies against them, and in particular that he was the medium of a correspondence between the court of Delhi and the French authorities in the Carnatic.  For these and similar practices he had been long detained in confinement.  But his talents and influence had not only procured his liberation, but had obtained for him a certain degree of consideration even among the British rulers of his country.