Ever yours

T. B. M.

The months of July and August Macaulay spent on the Neilgherries, in a climate equable as Madeira and invigorating as Braemar; where thickets of rhododendron fill the glades and clothe the ridges; and where the air is heavy with the scent of rose-trees of a size more fitted for an orchard than a flower-bed, and bushes of heliotrope thirty paces round.  The glories of the forests and of the gardens touched him in spite of his profound botanical ignorance, and he dilates more than once upon his “cottage buried in laburnums, or something very like them, and geraniums which grow in the open air.”  He had the more leisure for the natural beauties of the place, as there was not much else to interest even a traveller fresh from England.

“I have as yet seen little of the idolatry of India; and that little, though excessively absurd, is not characterised by atrocity or indecency.  There is nothing of the sort at Ootacamund.  I have not, during the last six weeks, witnessed a single circumstance from which you would have inferred that this was a heathen country.  The bulk of the natives here are a colony from the plains below, who have come up hither to wait on the European visitors, and who seem to trouble themselves very little about caste or religion.  The Todas, the aboriginal population of these hills, are a very curious race.  They had a grand funeral a little while ago.  I should have gone if it had not been a Council day; but I found afterwards that I had lost nothing.  The whole ceremony consisted in sacrificing bullocks to the manes of the defunct.  The roaring of the poor victims was horrible.  The people stood talking and laughing till a particular signal was made, and immediately all the ladies lifted up their voices and wept.  I have not lived three and thirty years in this world without learning that a bullock roars when he is knocked down, and that a woman can cry whenever she chooses.

“By all that I can learn, the Catholics are the most respectable portion of the native Christians.  As to Swartz’s people in the Tanjore, they are a perfect scandal to the religion which they profess.  It would have been thought something little short of blasphemy to say this a year ago; but now it is considered impious to say otherwise, for they have got into a violent quarrel with the missionaries and the Bishop.  The missionaries refused to recognise the distinctions of caste in the administration of the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, and the Bishop supported them in the refusal.  I do not pretend to judge whether this was right or wrong.  Swartz and Bishop Heber conceived that the distinction of caste, however objectionable politically, was still only a distinction of rank; and that, as in English churches the gentlefolks generally take the Sacrament apart from the poor of the parish, so the high-caste natives might be allowed to communicate apart from the Pariahs.